Month 22, November 2006

Lily started using three-word phrases this month. The first one was when we were putting her hair in pigtails one morning and she said, "Don't like hair". If we leave her hair down and just put barrettes in it, she smiles and says "Like!" Other three-word phrases she started using are "Lily do it", "Daddy fix it", and "Sit down Daddy!" She uses two-word phrases more often, like "Close door" and "Lily help" (she always want to "help" with whatever I'm doing, which is cute, so I let her). Some new words this month are "big" and "cough" -- she had a bad cough for 2-3 weeks (so did the other kids at day care), and would say "Lily cough", "Cailey cough", "Nangy cough", etc. (her day care friends). It helped that she knows what cough means now, because when I told her we were giving her "cough medicine", I think she saw the connection between cough and medicine (she didn't object as much to taking it).


We picked out a cool-looking playground from Little Tikes to give Lily for Christmas, and had it shipped. Even the box it came in was huge (it had to be dropped off in the garage rather than in the house). With nowhere to store it until Christmas, I just set it up in her playroom and let her have it in mid-November. I put down these blue foam mats so that she can fall from the playground without hurting herself. The playground has two parts, one part with a large- and a medium-sized slide, and the other part is just a little playhouse. They're connected by a tunnel you can crawl through. I think it looks like a lot of fun! But I'm too big to fit in the tunnel, and too heavy to play on it myself! The other side of her playroom has some floor space so she can ride her cars around.


Lily loves the new slides (her old slide was much smaller), and spends a lot of time in the house part. She always wants me to come play in there with her. A couple times Michelle was in there too, so all three occupants of our 3000-square-foot house were crammed into a 10-square-foot area!


Here's a Quicktime video of Lily learning to climb the sides of the playground. Click the photo to watch it, or download the file here.


We bought Little Leaps from LeapFrog, which are video games for toddlers with very easy controls. It requires a DVD player, so we took the one we had in the guest room and put it in Lily's room. (Sorry, future guests!) Lily pushes the button whenever the onscreen voice tells her too, and can hit the joystick, but can't yet control the direction the joystick moves in. She has also gotten interested in kids' movies now that she has a DVD player. I watched Lilo & Stitch about 10-15 times per week in her bedroom!


She also likes watching the Little Mermaid over and over, except for the scary parts with the sea witch, so we fast-forward over those. On December 2nd we took her to her first kid's movie in the theaters ("Happy Feet", starring a bunch of penguins, which she likes because of her stuffed Tux penguins), and she sat through the whole thing quietly.


Here Lily's painting some Christmas ornaments. She looked very focused while she painted. Good little worker!


Here's a movie of her painting (click or download it here).


At school they had a Thanksgiving mini-play (about five minutes) with the older kids in it (not Lily). Michelle went and had lunch with Lily, and Michelle Willis and Christine showed up too.


Some projects they did at school were building a teepee, an Indian headdress, and a macaroni necklace. You can just barely tell the teepee and hat apart!


This is the only outfit picture I took this month. Try not to notice that orange popsicle mark on her face. (Oh wait, I'm drawing more attention to it by mentioning it -- ignore everything I'm saying!)


Monday, November 27th, 2006 was an important first in Lily's life -- the first time we woke her up so we could all go to work and day care, and she said "Sleep!" Poor thing. Little does she know that she'll be having to drag herself reluctantly out of bed every morning for the next 80 or so years! Notice she's sleeping sideways. She does that a lot, shoving us to the edges of the bed.


Lily reached for the camera while we were playing, so I let her take some pictures. That's a corner of her playhouse in the picture she took, though most of it is covered by her finger in the third picture!


Lily was intently drawing with dry-erase markers on her whiteboard. She can open and close the markers herself, but she often doesn't close them, so they quickly dried out. I'll buy some more.


We had Thanksgiving dinner with Michelle Willis and her parents, Mr. and Mrs. Peugh, and her brother Matt. It was great, because for the first time in several years, we didn't have to do any cooking or cleaning ourselves on Thanksgiving! Whoo hoo!!


While we were at the Peugh's house, Madeline tried on some sunglasses, so Lily tried some glasses on too. She looks kind of like Harry Potter! (Harry Potter fans may know that his mom was named Lily in the books.)


Cameron's dad and sister led a double-team tickle attack on him! The girls got giggly being bounced on Michelle's knees together, and in the third picture Lily's relaxing on the couch.


We play with Play-Doh on the floor in the family room some evenings. I tried playing with her, but she wouldn't let me have any Play-Doh! "Lily's pay-do!" But she has to learn to share, so I got up and walked away whenever she wouldn't let me have any. ("Real mature", I know you're thinking.) Well, it worked, and she came to get me and brought me a ball of Play-Doh. On later days she started offering me Play-Doh without me having to throw a hissy fit.


Lily had a cough for three weeks this month, and some days she had a hoarse voice. One night we offered her some mini-popsicles, and she ate five of them the first night and seven of them the second! Maybe the made her throat feel better? Or maybe she just liked the sugar rush. See that dark-colored tongue in the third picture? That's what happens when you eat lots of different-colored popsicles!