18 Months, plus a couple days...

Our little girl is getting so big. It is hard to believe that she has hit the 18 month mark already. Everyone told us that things get really fun at 18 months. I think that Caitlyn has been fun for awhile but she just gets funnier every day. It is exciting to see her personality coming out everyday. Caitlyn was born was personality and attitude that has continued to grow since then. She is a funny little girl that is a little OCD at times and makes me laugh everyday, most of the time multiple times during the day. All that personality has its draw backs and the attitude comes out more and more, tantrums and screaming are two of her two new favorite things. There are some other things that she has started to do. Her new favorite is to clean, with wipes, and put a diaper on all of her stuffed animals. I think it is funny to watch even though it makes quite a mess, but I have learned that a little mess is a minimal price to pay for her happiness and not whining. She also likes to dress up all of her stuffed animals with cloths, bows, and especially shoes. She loves shoes and loves putting them on everyone around. It shouldn't be a surprise that my daughter's 5th word in the world is shoes. She also loves to put things in baskets and transfer them back and forth between baskets. Most people might think that is weird and boring but I think it is the funniest think in the world and that she is the cutest kid ever. I can't think of the other things that she does. Oh, she loves to take her dads hat and put it on and laughs hysterically and thinks she is the funniest thing in the world. Other eventful things have been a burst eardrum that started leaking blood, yeah that one freaked me out a little! And then the ensuing antibiotics for the next two weeks, which was horrible to give to her and made her pee smell horrible. She has attempted to go to nursery for the last two weeks, which has not gone so well. She runs in there and doesn't even look back, until about 15 minutes into it and then she realizes that we are not in there and freaks out. Caitlyn is not like some kids that can be consoled or distracted once she works up into a frenzy. So she hasn't lasted very long. Hopefully it will get better, they are supposedly splitting the nursery since there were 20 kids in there on Sunday. The leaders are great but 20 kids is insane and they don't like the parents to sit in there the whole time, which is understandable with that many kids and everything. So her are some more fun pictures of my little Rouske doing some of her favorite things. It is getting harder and harder to get a good picture of her because she moves so fast and when she looks at the camera she stops smiling for some reason, but she is still cute!

Where are you Spring?

I have learned that I don't really like winter that much. It is nice for about a week and then I am done with it. There is nothing fun about it and I think that it should only snow in the mountains and then be about 70 degrees at my house all year long! That would be my perfect world. So to help with this dream Caitlyn and I took a little trip to California where it is nice and warm!! My sister Holly just had her baby so we went to visit her and my other sister Mary and her two kids. It was Caitlyn's first time on a plane and it was a good thing my other sister Diane came with us or the person that would have had to sit next to us wouldn't have been a very happy person. She didn't really cry, just wiggled around and wanted to be everywhere, which is very normal for her. Being a first child, Caitlyn has never had to be around other kids for an extended period of time and this didn't go over very well at first. I time to socialize the little girl but we get to go home to her house after about an hour. So she had Evan and Sadie around her 24 hours a day. She would just cry every time Sadie came around and tried to touch "her" toys. After about 4 days she caught on to the fact that it was fun to have kids to play with and her and Sadie seemed to like each other! It was so nice to take a week break and be in warm weather and play outside all day. Caitlyn loved playing in Evan's "park" in his back yard. We even made a trip out to visit my grandma in LA and she had fun riding Sunny the dog and going to the beach for the first time. She wasn't so happy about the sand at first on her feet, but she liked it after a minute and played around and had so much fun! She is a funny little girl that doesn't like sand or dirt or anything on her hands, she gets that from her dad! So her are some fun pictures from the adventures. To make my hatred of winter worse it snowed the day that we came back and has been cold for the last week. I hear next week is supposed to get warmer, we will see!!