20-months and loving it!

Sassy Lucy sits for her 20-month-old holiday photo.

Lucy now weighs 20 pounds, is 30" tall and still has an 18"-round head. 

What can I say? Lucy is AWESOME. We keep thinking..."is she for real"?

Every morning starts with Lucy requesting to listen to music: "ah-bum, ah-bum"...meaning album.

Her favorite album is the Beatles. Favorite song: "She Loves You". She sings the yeah, yeah, yeahs from this song during it and throughout the day whenever she is thinking about her song. Other music she particularly rocks out to (dancing): Primus, The Fresh Prince, and Louis Armstrong.

A new activity is that Lucy likes to decorate Canute with things. He is very tolerant. She tears up pieces of tinfoil and lays them on him. She lays diapers on him while I am folding the laundry. She puts napkins on him. Anything she finds suitable. He just lays there and gets up when he's had enough.

Lucy can count to 6! She did it for the first time today with me and then tonight with Matt, she counted to 4. She can also say the alphabet very well with help along the way. Smarty-pants!

She loves to strike poses all the time and enjoys pushing her limits.

Lucy also thinks the animals love her to practically sit on them throughout the day.

Last week we had a good amount of blowing snow. It was quite a storm. Toward the end we went out and built a snowman. Then Lucy and Matt went for a walk afterward (while I gave the snowman some clothes) and came home to find the decorated snowman. Here is a little video Matt shot when they got home:

Lucy meets the snowman.

Playing in the fresh snow.

Walking in last week's blizzard.

Oh Christmas Tree!

Last weekend we went up the road to search for our early Christmas tree for this year. Since we won't be home for the holidays we thought it would still be fun and cheery to have a tree in the house for all of us to enjoy.

Lucy is amazed by the tree every day and loves all the ball ornaments especially, which are glass of course! She enjoyed helping us decorate the tree.

Lucy staring the tree the next morning....

...and then learning she can hide behind it!

Lucy and I enjoyed cooking together twice this past week. They are the first two times that I have given her her own bowl with ingredients or dough, for example, to make something with. She cut out her own little biscuits the other day!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Matt and I hosted Thanksgiving again this year for a handful of our friends. We had a really great time and the collaborative effort for the food was tasty indeed. Where's Lucy you might ask? She is running around playing during these photos. I think she lasted about 2 minutes at the dinner table and decided she had other more important things to do.

Lucy had a fun night playing with Keet, now 3, and Cord, now 20 months. She received much attention from everyone, as did all the kids. We really had a lovely evening with everyone!

After dinner, Matt and Lucy hung out at the dessert table together while Lucy washed up in his water glass. She dipped her hand in his glass over and over and then rubbed it on her face and hair. Silly girl! Her latest discovery is that she can smear food into her hair, maybe this interest in washing herself will help this issue?

Friday Family Night

Friday night we had a very relaxing evening together. We went swimming at the pool, went out for pizza (pza-pza) for the first time in a year and a half (due to Lucy's issue with dairy for so long), and then mama got some time in printing at the studio while dada and Lucy watched for a bit.

Lucy was intrigued watching me screenprint. She kept wanting to touch what I was using so we gave her a roll of tape to distract her.

I love Lucy's hairdo here.

Rock Star Lucy

What goes on while mama is away in the evening teaching and working in the studio...

The sweet little 19-Month-Old

I am a little late this week in honoring Lucy turning 19-months-old but I sure haven't forgotten! I've just been rather busy since all my time these days is jam-packed with chasing after Lucy, playing games with her, reading to her, feeding her, cooking, cleaning, prepping for teaching, and somehow making as much work as possible for my upcoming show in January. Matt has been so supportive and my time in the studio has doubled this month so I can actually get my printing done.

The day Lucy turned 19 months old Matt took her on their first ski of the season. He created his own "bundle cover" for Lucy to ride in on his back within the backpack. It is an old down coat that he modified. Considering that temperatures have reached -15 at our house, this seems like the perfect creation.

Way to go dada! She looks as snug as a bug...sleepy...but happy.

Lucy's vocabulary has expanded so much recently it is impossible to keep up. Every day she says at least 10 new words. She amazes us. A toddler's memory is simply incredible. Some of my favorite words she says are: acooo (avocado), aht-brow (eyebrow), purple, sa-mn (salmon), and dute (Canute). Recent new words that I can recall from the past week are hand, coffee, beer, snow, stars, sun, knee, spoon, and fork. Lucy has taken to playing with adult-size gloves all the time. I'm talking about work gloves, rubber cleaning gloves, you name it. She puts them on and pushes her cars around, plays with her stuffed animals and even brings them to bed with her. Silly. Lucy is super independent. Today I watched her put on her winter boots by herself for the first time. They were on the wrong feet so I tried to help her fix them. This upset her quite a bit but she got over it and I think she felt more comfortable once they were corrected! They are the first pair of hard-soled shoes/boots she's actually wanted to wear. Her favorite things to do are play with water, as in pouring water from one container to the other, feed the animals and torture them by pouring food from one container to the other, and color or draw. Her favorite foods are salmon, eggs, avocado, fruit/berries, kalamata olives, kamut puffs, white potatoes/sweet potatoes, and meat.

Happy Birthday Dada!

Happy 43rd birthday to Matt!

At first Lucy appears uninterested in the cake, or perhaps just mesmerized by the candle. Notice Matt got a 1-year-old candle for his cake!

Then, Lucy suddenyl realized she has a chance to blow out a candle...

...stick her finger in some chocolate frosting...

...and eat it too! Yum.

Hanging out with Dada

Lucy has been spending a lot of time with her dada the last couple of weeks because mama has been in the studio so much to prepare for her show. He's shot some great videos and I am sharing two of my favorites:

Happy Halloween!

We went out for a short while on Saturday with our little ladybug to the Halloween festivities at the UAF Wood Center.

The hood with the antennae didn't remain on for very long but I was able to sneak a couple shots in before Lucy was done with having her head covered up.

Lucy received a glow-in-the-dark bracelet from a nice lady that she kept saying "whoa" at. She loved it!

Cute behind shot. This little ladybug moved so fast I almost couldn't keep up with her...

It's Jack O' Lantern time

We couldn't wait to carve our pumpkin with Lucy because we knew she'd be completely into it. The expected happened: she wanted to draw on the pumpkin and she wanted to hold the knife over and over again. We kept our design simple and got through it without any blood or tears. It was super fun to see her amazement when we lit the candle and shut off the lights! Sorry, no photo to document that.

It's Lucy's Half Birthday!

Lucy is now 18 months old and she's loving it! Little miss independence has bloomed. Lucy now walks down the stairs while holding onto the railing all by herself. I am pretty impressed. She eats her oatmeal and soup with a spoon too and refuses any assistance. She's just learned the method of using the spoon over the bowl to catch dribbles since she always looses half the soup on the spoon while bringing it to her mouth.

Little table tantrums have begun and we hope they are short lived. They are definitely based on being frustrated but we have a hard time knowing exactly what she means or needs sometimes. It must be hard to be such a little person with so much to say but you don't know how to say it yet!

New words since the last post: water, rain, eggs, breakfast, uh oh, woof, vino (dada taught her this one!), and shoes. I am sure there are more but it is hard to remember because she'll pretty much give any word a go if you ask her to say it. Sometimes she'll shake her head though and thinks other words are too hard. Lucy weighs 19.6 pounds, her height is 30.5 inches and that little noggin's circumference is 18".

Our little snow fairy loves the fresh snow today.

She was chasing Canute on the road and giggling with delight!

Lucy was amazed by the snow on the pumpkins and kept pointing to it. Our walk was short lived today as Lucy suddenly decided it was time for a nap. Canute was so disappointed because he couldn't wait to run around in the snow. I think winter is here to stay though, this snow looks like it will stick.

A Sunny October Walk

I like to think that Lucy is looking at me and how happy I am to be out on a walk with her, however, I am pretty sure she is staring at the buttons on the side of my hat!

Lucy actually posed for me at the start of our walk. I asked her to smile and voila!

She was cruising down the trail at high speed and kept slipping and falling. Eventually she asked to be carried.

Lucy still finds rocks to be the most interesting!

A little "mimi" mid-walk is inevitable.

We paused for awhile here and then turned around to head home.