The third week in January had us traveling to see Gammie & Papa for his retirement ceremony and luncheon. Thirty-five years as a civilian in the Air Force is definitely worthy of a celebration with plenty of pomp and circumstance! The ceremony was held in the Museum of Aviation adjacent to the base which is basically a hangar. Savannah and her cousin, Adler, really enjoying running around and exploring all the helicopters and planes before the ceremony started. Adler was the model 3 1/2 year old sitting quietly for 95% of the ceremony, Savannah on the other hand acted every bit her 18 months. She was not at all interested sitting and playing with the multitude of quiet toys we brought, instead she wanted to continue to run around and explore. Our choices were either force her to sit on our laps which would surely cause her to pitch a fit or quitely let her explore the area behind where everyone was seated, we chose the latter. While the guest of honor disagrees, we know it was a total distraction and we were thoroughly embarrassed.
We stayed with Gammie & Papa through the weekend and as always we had a great time despite our little angel not sleeping well, something we've come to expect anytime we go out of town. Saturday morning we visited Go Fish which is basically an educational center that promotes fishing opportunities throughout their state. We really enjoyed the the interactive games and Savannah loved the big indoor tanks.
After the Go Fish we decided to drive over to the Ag Center and realized they were having a horse show, since we had nothing better to do and thought Savannah should have her first look at horses we decided to stop in and check out the action.
Gammie & Papa arrived on New Year's Day to celebrate Christmas and 'help' us screen in our back porch! By 'help' I mean they did most of the work because we had to go back to work a couple days after they arrived, thankfully James was able to take a half day one day during the week too. I'm not skilled in saws and drills so I provided the child care, snacks, drinks and supervision while everyone else worked their tails off. We felt terrible because it rained almost every afternoon delaying their progress, they didn't want to leave us with a lot of work to do so they just kept extending their trip day after day. They completely finished up on Thursday (so quick!) and headed home. They did such and amazing job and we are SO thankful for their hard work and expertise.
Holy crap. How is she only 6 months away from being 2?!
We went to the doctor on Monday for her 18 month check up and everything looks great. She weighed in at 23 lbs., 11 oz. (50th percentile), she is 32" tall (60th percentile) and her head was 19.5" around (90th percentile). James says she got his noggin, the doctor said she is just really smart...we'll go with the doctor on this one.
She has been battling a cold for the past couple weeks, poor thing has been coughing so much and her little nose has just been running non-stop. Fortunately she hasn't run a fever and the doctor checked her ears and they looked fine, unfortunately for her it meant she was still able to get her 18 month vaccines.
She is right ontrack with her skills - drawing, picking up something and brining it to us when asked, gives hugs and kisses, etc. And a bit advanced in her language, she only needs to have 6-10 words at this point but she has at least 17 words and can string 2 words together, which according to the doctor is a 2 1/2 year skill.
Words are as follows... mommy (now said with a British accent which is hilarious), puppy, doggie, hi, hey, bye, lunch, go, no, whoa, ouch, cheese, uh huh, thank you, more juice, monkey and let's go.
She also does the sign for 'more' and is quite demanding when doing so. Yesterday she handed me her snack cup that had cereal in it and started very insistently signing for more and just this evening James gave her a little piece of a Reese's peanut butter cup and she was signing for more before she even swallowed the first piece! I think we're going to need to work on 'please' next.
She has 9 teeth, four on the top, 3 on the bottom and a molar on each side and any day now the other bottom tooth is going to pop through. Thankfully she seems to do pretty well with teething, doesn't seem to give her a low-grade fever or disturb her sleep.
These photos are from a couple days before Christmas, we learned that she is still too young to bake (note the flour EVERYWHERE) but she certainly enjoyed helping.
Christmas is always fun and exciting but it is so much more fun and exciting when you've got a child to share it with, even when they aren't old enough to fully grasp the whole concept (side note: in the coming years we'll be trying to figure out how to balance the true meaning of Christmas with Santa).
We had quite the Christmas miracle this year, we had plans to attend the 6:00 p.m. Christmas Eve service and then go out to dinner with one of our favorite couples, unfortunately the evil stomach bug struck again (thank God it wasn't our family again) and that plan was cancelled around 4:00 but we decided to go ahead on our own. Now dinner time is usually 6:00 and the bed time routine starts around 7:30 so we were excpecting nothing short of disaster. Our little angel was well, a perfect angel. We came prepared with snacks galore, crayons and books but we didn't even need them, she was the model child in church and even the model child at the Japanese restaurant. A Christmas miracle indeed!
Christmas morning we had Grandma, Uncle Patrick and Uncle Andy over for breakfast and present opening. Savannah's big gift this year was a play kitchen, we knew she would eventually enjoy playing with it but we weren't sure if she'd enjoy it immediately - thankfully she LOVED it right away!
I think her favorite part of the kitchen is that phone, she has carried it around the house every day since. Looking back, we probably should have given her the kitchen last because she was more interested in playing with it rather than opening her HUGE pile of gifts. Oh well, just made Christmas morning last a little longer.
Not all of these gifts are hers but I'd guess about 75% were!
We only got her a few things but our little girl was most definitely spoiled with plenty of cute outfits and some super fun toys! Her closet might be getting an extra shelf soon and it looks like Toys R Us exploded in the living room and it isn't even over yet, this weekend we'll be celebrating Christmas all over again with Gammie & Papa and then again in a few weeks with her cousins!
Savannah wasn't the only one that got cool gifts, James got me an iPod touch and it has pretty much been attached to my hand for the past 5 days. And when it isn't attached to my hand, it's attached to his...I think we might be a little obsessed. I don't know if I have access to WiFi at work but if I do, let's just say my productivity will be WAY down.
We've both been off work all week (I had to go in until 11:30 a.m. on Monday) and it has been so nice!! This is the first time in 9 years that I've had this week off, to say I was eagerly anticipating it would be a major understatement. I know Savannah has really enjoyed having both of us home, she's even been sleeping until 7:15 which still sounds early but I assure you it is late for her. However, I'm already starting to worry about next week when we're back to the normal routine. I definitely don't envy James having to drop her off at daycare on Monday morning, something tells me it isn't going to be without tears on her part.
Savannah was officially 17 months old on November 27 and yes, I'm more than a little behind on the update.
She is constantly increasing her vocabulary, seems like she learns a new word every day...or maybe our intepretation of what she's saying changes every day. Among others and in addition to the 16 month update words she now says include: -mommy (which I love, love, love hearing) -puppy -thank you -cracker -uh huh (complete with shaking head for yes) -monkey (this is new within the past day or so) -lunch (although she uses it for any meal) -bye bye or just bye (complete with waving and at the right time) -love you (ok, this might just be one of our interpretations)
I know I've mentioned before that she loves to be outside but she knows that she can't go out without shoes on so she will find her shoes and bring them to you (and not just the first two shoes she finds, an actual pair of shoes) then sit down in front of you so you can put them on her. She tries very hard to put them on herself but hasn't mastered that yet.
She knows that when it is time to eat she has to get in her chair so all we have to say is, "Are you ready to eat?" and she'll run over to the table and start pulling her chair out. She is very much into climbing on everything, including the kitchen table, so we have joked about tying the chairs together so she can't pull them out to climb up them, hopefully we won't actually have to follow through.
We fall more in love with our little angel every day.
We spent Thanksgiving with James' family this year and as we always do when we are there, we had a fabulous time. We even got to go on a lunch date, big thanks to Gammie & Papa for keeping an eye on our pumpkin so we could enjoy a meal together that we didn't have to cut into tiny pieces and share.
Savannah really enjoyed getting to play with her cousins and hang out with her Aunt Tonia & Uncle Mike, we can't ever manage to live within less than a 5 hour drive of each other so we don't get to see them quite as often as we'd like.
Unfortunately she somehow managed to catch a stomach bug while we were there and spent the better part of Saturday evening sick. Thank goodness for hardwood floors, extra PJ's and the fastest washer of clothes in the East - by the time we had to change into her 3rd pair of pajamas the first pair was dried and folded! We thought we managed to allude the short, but terrible bug but alas, by Monday night I was sick and James came down with it on Tuesday, then my mom managed to catch it later in the week. Thankfully that is behind us now.
