2 1/2 years old!!!

Kyla loves finger painting

SO Cute

What a mess!!!

Hard at work!

Kyla playing with her polly pockets
Swaddling her baby

Busy little mommy

Putting all her babies to sleep

Playing Candyland

Playing Princess Chutes and Ladders

Dress up time!!!







Wow! Kyla is two and a half years old! I think she just gets cuter, funnier, smarter and more fun each day.

At two and a half she has just started gymnastics at Aurora Kids and loves it! When she turns three we will also start her in dance there. This is her first time in a structured group setting and she really likes it. I guess I might have to start considering looking into preschool for her. I still have not decided if I want to start her in a preschool program this upcoming fall or wait until the next fall when she is four years old. Maybe for now I will just enjoy all of the time I get to spend with her and just keep enrolling her in fun classes for awhile. She will be starting an art class one day a week soon and we might look into signing her up for a music class too.

Some of Kyla's favorite toys lately are polly pockets and babies. She can sit in one place and dress and undress all of her polly pockets for the longest time. I think it is the most focused and quiet that she has ever been. She just got them for Christmas and absolutely loves them. Kyla also loves playing babies. She will get out all of her babies, all three beds, a hignchair, car seat, moses basket and tons and tons of blankets, bottles, paicifiers, clothes and medical kit and just take care of her babies for hours. It is so cute how she plays with them, sings to them and cares for them. It is really fun to watch and see how much she has picked up from me in learning to care for babies.

Kyla also loves games. We bought her a video game and many board and card games for Christmas and she has been having a wonderful time learning to play them all. We have been playing Princess Chutes and Ladders, CandyLand, Memory, Uno, Hullabaloo, Hi ho Cheery-o and more. It is so fun that she can now participate in these fun interactive games with us and it makes me want to go out and buy a lot more fun games to play with her. I have always loved playing games and now I finally have someone to play them with since Jon has never really wanted to play.

One of Kyla other favorite things to do is to play dress up. She loves dressing up in all of her fun fancy dresses, tutu's, dress up shoes and jewlery. She got a cute dress up trunk full of fun dress up things for Christmas from her Aunt Lisa and Uncle David and we have it filled to the rim with all of her dress up clothes now. She is so funny, she will put one cute outfit on and then instead of taking it off to put the next one on she just starts layering. She will have close to ten seperate outfits all on at once.

Kyla still likes playing with Legos, Little People, Thomas the Train and kitchen, but for now these have all taken a backseat to her new favorite activities.

Kyla is also very much into Music, Nursery Rhymes and Books. I should enroll her in a kindermusik class to keep growing her love for music. She knows so many songs, it really is amazing! She sings whenever we are in the car, the bathtub or just playing. Some of her favotire kids songs are Old MacDonald, Bingo, Skidamarink, ABC's, Miss Mary Mack, This Old Man, Mulberry Bush and the list could go on and on and on. We have a ton of kids CD's and she always wants to listen to them. She also loves "Baby" by Justin Beiber and "Stuck like Glue" by SugarLand. The only Tv she watches is Babysongs DVD's which are also all music. Kyla also knows all the words to an incredible number of Nursery Rhymes. We have four Nursery Rhyme books and she knows almost all of them from each one. Kyla also can not get enough of reading books. She has a huge collection of books and loves all of them. We read books for atleast half an hour every night before going to bed. She has so much fun picking out which books she wants to read and when we are done she is usually begging to read more.

Kyla also really enjoys doing Art, so I am pretty excited for her to start her new art class next week. The art class is being offered by a new children's botique called Sweet Adelines. The classes sound like they will be a lot of fun and they are really small classes so I think she will do really well in it. Kyla's favorite art project to do lately is fingerpainting. She gets really excited to fingerpaint and concentrates so hard on making a pretty picture. She also really likes doing art projects with stamps now. At the end of gymnastics class all the kids gets stamps on their hands, feet and tummy, so this really sparked an interest in stamps for her.

Other things that Kyla really loves is helping me cook, playing with Grandma and playing with her friends Ethan and Ella. She gets so excited to do all three of these things. She gives Grandma the biggest guilt trip when it is time to leave, she looks at her and says" Grandma I want you, hold me" with the saddest face and then as soon as Grandma is not looking she grins so big.

SO far this winter we have had really cold weather, we have had a ton of below zero degree days and the reast have been just barely above zero. We also barely have any snow since it has been to cold to snow and when it has snowed it has ended up getting to warm or windy and melting all the snow. Kyla has not been able to play outside very much, but we are really looking forward to a bit warmer weather and hopefully some more snow so we can get out and go sledding, snowmachining and skiing more. Kyla loves to play outside and make snow angels, snowman and play and it has been hard to be stuck inside as much as we have been this winter.

Of course I think that Kyla is very smart and I think that she talks very well for her age, as every parent does. But she is also just so funny when she talks. She loves to ask questions and it is so funny how she asks them. Instead of just asking you something she either says for example "Do you want this or not?" or she will say something like "Do you want this on or off", "Is it hot or cold?"... pretty much every question ends with either saying or not or by asking whatever the opposite is. I really think that it is pretty smart of her to know the opposite to whatever it is that she is aking, and of course it is just cute too.

At Two and a half years old Kyla is potty trained!!! She has been pretty much completely potty trained for the past month and has had very few accidents. She still wears a pull-up for nap (on the rare occasion when she does nap) and at night, but hates that I put her in it and usually wakes up dry anyway. She has been going potty on the toilet since she was 14 months old, but we didn't really push her to only use the potty until recently. We bought her a Sesame Street book called Abby Cadabby uses the Potty, it is a really cute book with several buttons to push with sound effects for flushing, washing hands... Kyla was able to put a sticker on the book every time that she went potty and it really made her want to only go potty in the toilet. Now she has her stool next to the toilet and just goes in there all by herself without being reminded and goes potty. It is very impressive how easy the potty training process was for her. She has wanted Princess underwear for awhile and I had bought her some but told her she could not have them until she was no longer going potty in her pull ups, so now she proudly wears "fancy princess underwear"!

Kyla is a very sweet girl, loves to be a big helper and is extremely independent and very much a girl. She loves to play dress up, wear nail polish, play with makeup and is very dramatic and emotional. She is probably the most independent person that I have ever met. If you try to do anything for her, she yells "No, I'll do it!". Kyla has to not only pick out her own clothes and pajamas each day and get herself dressed, she also has to pick out Daddy's clothes each day. She has to pick out which cup she drinks from and put the lid on by herself, pick out her dishes and utensils, open any packages of food, get out her toys and pick up her toys (which is fine with me) and everything else during the day BY HERSELF!!! It is probably are biggest struggle with her because there really are times that we need to help her with certain things for either safety or time and she does not understand that and just demands to do everything by herself.

We really feel so lucky to have such a wonderful daughter! She is adorable and so sweet to everyone. She plays great with others and is very caring. She is everything that we could have ever wanted in a daughter and more!