Happy Birthday TWO you!

Yes, it's true--we have a two-year-old. We knew this was both inevitable and imminent, but it's still a bit hard to believe.
For Kate's birthday we took her to the zoo. It's been cold but it was a nice day for it. She got to ride the carousel twice, once with Dad and once with Mom, and we spent a lot of time in the Kids' Zone, as has become customary.

They have this long double slide (the otter slide) that Kate can go down all by herself. It's never a very fast slide, and people often get stuck halfway down, but the cold seemed to slow it down even more. Kate had to pull herself along with her feet the whole way. She sure enjoyed it, though--I think she went down maybe four times.


Kate is growing, learning, adding to her vocabulary, and stringing more words together. It's sometimes a struggle to communicate, but we are often impressed by her resourcefulness in getting her point across. She's rather opinionated and strong-willed, and we are doing our best to try to teach her and enjoy her at the same time. She loves all animal toys and is firmly convinced that any animal toy she sees, anywhere, is there for her to play with. She had a brief meltdown at the zoo when we prevented her from swiping a stuffed monkey off someone else's stroller.

Kate dances. There are a couple of movies that she watches that have songs that she always has to dance to--usually with one of us, but she'll dance on her own if necessary. In Bambi, it's the part where the bucks are racing around the meadow, to very exciting music. She knows when that scene is coming, and she'll run over to me, hold up her arms, and say, "Dance! Dance!" Then I pick her up and we whirl around the living room, bouncing up and down. When it's over she points at the TV and says, "More dance! More dance!" and we rewind and do it again. (I have a feeling she would be content to rewind and repeat all day, if she could find a dance partner with that much energy).

Kate makes us laugh. Sometimes at inappropriate moments. Last week in church, she was sitting on the floor near my feet and bonked her head (not hard) against the leg of the pew. She clapped her hand to her head and said, "Oh! That hurts!" And then she did it again. Bonk. "Oh! That hurts!" (Actually it was more like, "Das Huws!") I could almost see her thought process--"If I do this again, will it still hurt? Hmmm, yep, still hurts. Let's try it again. Ow!" She did it about six or seven times in a row, clutching her head dramatically each time and exclaiming loudly. I was laughing so hard I was wiping tears from my eyes.

Happy Birthday, Squidgit! We are blessed to have you in our family.