Sunday, May 12, 2013

A great day...



 Today was a great day.
I have so much joy in my heart today for my family.
I loved getting up with my little Evangeline at 6am and starting our day together. 
Jeffrey was kind enough to make pancakes.
Not just any pancakes.
Banana whole wheat oat pancakes with real maple syrup.
Does he know me or what?
And he was so so so great to not give me breakfast in bed - yuck.
 
I can't believe Evangeline's already 17 months.
She's wonderful and she also made sure I had a wonderful Mother's Day.

She doesn't usually nap with me, but when she woke up from her nap and was still tired,  she fell asleep with me. I just enjoyed the snuggles and couldn't stop thinking about how much she's grown.

Evangeline and I have always both enjoyed cuddling.
Even from the start.
 This was when we were leaving the hospital...

And here we are today. 
 17 months later and still snuggling.

I still can't believe how long she's gotten!
 Best Mother's Day present Evie girl could have given me.


 Mother's Day 2013 was very special.
I can't even tell you how very special.

 Thankfully we wouldn't be here without our mamas.




 And we're blessed that our moms love our sweet little baby just as much as they loved us. 
Thank goodness for all those good mamas,
 and thank goodness for all the women that are good mamas at heart who are just waiting patiently for their turn.


Thursday, April 18, 2013

You ain't seen nothin' yet...

Baseball season has started.
Jeff tried to get Evangeline excited about the upcoming Giants season by playing baseball with her :)



Our lil' Miss Evie Mae is a quite the dancer.
She's been dancing like crazy since February, but it just keeps getting better and better...


Tuesday, April 9, 2013

Egg Basket

Miss Evie Mae picked out her egg hunting basket at the store weeks before Easter arrived. 
Lucky for us it was covered in glitter :)
And so was our house the couple of weeks before Easter finally was here.
Jeff said I didn't have to buy it, but I loved glittery things when I was a girl. Heck I still do but I feel like it isn't as accepted to like glitter once you've graduated from elementary school.
So of course Evie got to take it home with us.

We'd been reading the book Spots First Easter and it was like she already knew what to do once we got home. She was obviously a born Easter egg hunter.
I don't know why we didn't let her go at in last year? 
I mean at 4 months I think she totally could've done it ;)

The funniest part was I wasn't planning on having her hide eggs b/c I thought it would be too difficult and confusing, but she did it on her own. 
I'd find eggs in my diaper bag, under the couch, and on the bookshelf.

She'd walk around talking about eggs and her egg basket.
She'd said the word "egg" for a couple of months now but "basket" was new due to the holiday festivities (just like she learned "heart" from Valentine's Day).

However, on Easter she wasn't expecting to find something in the eggs...



 
 A couple bunny cookies in each proved to be quite the distraction for a while!
Finally she moved on to hunt the rest of them...

Here she is totally being so boss at Easter egg hunting :)



Easter

This little girl had a pretty fun Easter this year.
She still makes it difficult to snap a picture of her smiling :)
But she does look like a little doll in her new dress!

This was our attempt to get a picture before the sun back from behind the clouds,
but as you can tell by Evie's face, we were not successful.

 Grammy got some smiles though :)


The Easter bunny did come visit Miss Evie Mae this year...

 Luckily Grammy and Papa Chris left some fun barn animals, a book, and some Easter animals. Grandma Rainy and Papa Tan Tan's little bunny Sorbet made an appearance there too.

 And the Cheddar Bunnies were the automatic hit...

 And then they stole the show for a while as everything else remained untouched...

 Her new bunny finger puppets...


Really this picture sums up Evie's favorite part of Easter...



Sunday, March 3, 2013

Life According to Evie lately...

...and over the last couple months.

This little girl is totally our favorite person ever. She is just too cute and funny and kind and smart and is such a talker.

When we first got back from NC, this girl decided to keep crawling everywhere in January and she loved pushing her baby dolls in boxes.
 At first I was confused why she kept doing this, I mean putting a baby in a box? Weird right?
 But then I remembered WE push Evie in boxes and pretend they're trains ha!
Remember her birthday party?

In January (13 months) Evie started making more animal sounds. She added ducks (duack duack) to her vocab, so we started to study them by going to watch them at Golden Gate park.




 She still wasn't walking, so she'd just stand their squealing and saying, "duack duack!"

Evie and I had a lot of tea parties in January.
 She already knew how to "pour" drink into her cup with the sounds and she loves pressing the sound button still. 

Since she still wasn't walking much (and only really wanted to be held in January), we hung out at the swings at playgrounds.


At the end of January, we went to the library and checked out lots of books about ducks.
We'd go to Golden Gate park everyday studying something different about ducks.

This day Evie learned that ducks eat bread just like she does.


When we'd feed the ducks, she'd squeal "bread num num num" and kick her legs like crazy.

 That night she said, "It eats bread" to her rubber duckie.

After 14 months, she became a walker :)
That week when we'd go to the parks, I'd have her hold one of my hands and she'd walk beside me.
Before this, we kept having her walk towards us and it just didn't motivate her.
So I thought maybe if she walks with us, she'll do it. 
And it worked. 
She's been a walker ever since and getting faster everyday.

This worked out perfectly for our trip to Sacramento with Dada at the beginning of February since we went to the children's museum there again. 
She had a blast with the rubber ducks at the water tables and wasn't happy until she had collected all of them. She also loved the French grocery store and kept restocking the shelves with cans of escargot and blocks of brie. 

The best part of the trip was walking around Sacramento in the park with the orange trees. 
In January, she started saying "Brr"(meaning cold) from this favorite book of hers. 
The page it is from says, "Brrr. Are you chilly?"
I know it by memory didn't realize Evie did too. 
I recited from the beginning of the book and had just recited the page right before the "brrr" page. Before I could even say, "Brr. Are you chilly?" Evie folds her arms and puts her hands on top of each other saying "Brrr."

Shopping turned into a 2 person job (she hates strollers when she could be shopping) by mid-February.

In February, Evie LOVED Valentine's day.
She made Valentine's and got some from her cousin Kaden.





We made sugar cookies with heart cookie cutters from Nana :) 
I didn't want her to eat the cookie dough, but she was too quite and took a nibble. 
Once she had a nibble, I figured what's a few more. 
Each bite she'd say, "Num num num num" and reach for more.
She liked the cookies too, but I think the dough was her favorite unless you count the frosting :)

In February our friends the Riches also came to California and they were able to stop in SF.
I love how these kids were so squirmy :)
They were able to run around at our favorite park.


We also went on a couple of long hikes in February.
Point Reyes was gorgeous.


 It was a long hike (8 miles) but totally worth it.
Here is where we ate our lunch.
Evie was impressed as she ate her sandwich. 
I loved the Clover farms. The most beautiful I've ever seen.

 On the way back we booked it and shaved off a whole half hour from our time.
We did have an afternoon nap we had to make it back to the car in time for. 
I tried putting her in a different position, but as you can see she just wanted to play peek-a-boo with Dada.




 Evie held her water bottle almost the entire way back from the hike. 
Jeff kept saying, "Way to keep hydrated Evie" :)


 We loved you Point Reyes.

We've had lot of berries at our house lately and strawberries are her favorite so far.
After I go grocery shopping, I let Evie help unpack the bags. 
Two weeks in a row I left the strawberries in the bag for her and she managed to open them each time and have little pre-dinner nibble...





 The best part was watching her pick off the green tops.
This girl watches her mama cut up strawberries :)

Our favorite new development is her cleanliness. She has started picking up after herself lately. If she drops her snack, she says, "Uh-oh," picks it up, and gives it to me.

She is allowed to get into all our cabinets and drawers in the kitchen to play (we baby-proofed it at 6 1/2 months), but I just switched the Ziploc bags to a lower drawer because I thought it would be fun for her to pull them out. She loves it. She pulls them out, opens them, sticks her hand inside of them, closes them again, puts them all back in the box, and then goes to put the box back (usually she doesn't make it back to the drawer before she decides to do it all over again ha!).

At our friends home, she picked up all the toys she was playing with and stuck them all on top of the table to "clean" up or reorganize. Reorganizing is her other favorite habit. We find stuff in the craziest places. She has always done this since she started crawling, but since she turned 12 months the hiding places became even more difficult. It makes me so happy when I find a remote or a Little People toy in our hamper. It's just too funny to me.

I love our conversations lately though.

Recently at Target:
Evie passes the baby doll aisle (I usually avoid it) and starts screaming, "Baby baby baby." I caved and turned in. She found mini dolls and picked one.

Putting its head on her shoulder she says, "My baby my baby my baby." Then starts trying to unvelcro the doll's outfit (she has one at home that has velcro on the back too and a diaper underneath). She says, "Diaper diaper." I took the outfit off and said, "Look this baby doesn't have a diaper on it."

Evie responds, "Uh-oh." :)

Now she says animal sounds for cows, dogs, cats, ducks, birds, bunnies (what do they do? "hop hop"), bears, lions, tigers, and monkeys. We are working on sea lions right now.

She says "no" very well but at 13 months it was still at "nuh" for "no" and she also can say eyes (careful though she likes to touch eyelashes), ears, mouth, and nose (nose started in January as "no"). 

She says lots of three word sentences like, "I did it." "Hold it baby" "It's a duck" "It's a star" "blow the nose" (can you tell we've been sick for over a week now?)

Her favorite things to do are to cuddle with Dada and sing her Dada song, Bye-bye birdie (this is legit - don't ask why it's this song), and the Duck with the Feather on it's back song (she says "duack duack duack" on cue). Oh yeah...and she LOVES to hear stories about herself :)

Evie you're just so special and too cute.  Happy Fifteen Months Baby Girl!