Esme at 26 months

She can finally jump with both feet and 'get air.' She can go up and down the stairs without much worry from me.. but I still like to be somewhere downhill of her just in case. She can take off her shirt and is working at pulling her pants up and down. She can drink from a straw well and carry the cup from surface to surface without it necessarily ending in cleanup. She is talking so much more than ever before - although sometimes I still wish we could understand each other better.

She knows all the letters of the alphabet but will still get mixed up with lowercase 'l' and uppercase 'I' on her Starfall games. She can navigate half of the arrow-key maze on one of the games before she gets frustrated, tell me where the letters go in the 'make a word' puzzles that have all the letters up top in different shapes and the shapes down below they go into, play the match games with me on-screen (point to where she saw it last and is usually right) etc... I am amazed and happy she loves the site so much. She is also working on her numbers and colors more but without as much interest. She is very interested in letters: The other day she actually took Daddy's books off the shelf (big no no) just so she could name off the letters on the covers to me.

Mark got a new remote control truck off of the Christmas clearance aisle. Esme loves it - says 'car! car!' and demanded to be shown how it works. She can make it go forward but then goes and runs to get it and turns it around instead of using reverse. She keeps looking for the button on the car that would make it run around like her zhu zhu hamster, but then remembers the handheld device and makes it go using that. She was playing with the steering on it but couldn't get both the steering wheel and the accelerator at the same time in her little hands.

Last night I had my mom on speakerphone and Esme had the phone walking around the room. My mom asked Mark if he was going to go outside and play in the new snow. He said 'No' very loudly and Esme put the phone facedown on the bed and shook her finger at it. Daddy had said the phone was bad - and she was 100% certain she wasn't in trouble, but the phone was - so it needed a timeout. She still doesn't entirely 'get' how the phone talks - but is much more willing to think it is a person now than a toy.

Now this morning we've already had tea with our stuffed frog (he ate teacakes and a car.. so yummy).. She has also offered a notebook to her 'mommy and daddy' dollhouse dolls and asked them to draw with her. That didn't work like she had planned - so now she is back to Mommy asking me to get a pen out of a drawer she can see but not reach - so she can draw with me. Now that I'm typing she is over at the bed showing Mark how well she can draw and asking him to draw with her. Also all of the white crayons out of her box are on my desk... I think she wants them fixed because they 'don't draw.' haha

I originally had to go to work at 10 today but they changed it last minute yesterday. I have to go in at 12:30 and then I have the weekend off. I feel I've been making a habit of looking scruffy lately - winter weather, very little time to get ready in the mornings, laundry being a hassle so I do the minimum necessary etc... so I did some 'me' stuff after getting home last night and hope to get my hair trimmed up this weekend. They went through some 'confidence' and interview stuff at the beginning of our managerial training yesterday and it kicked me a little higher into gear.


Esme drawing with pen - I circled the part Daddy did but the rest is hers