Happy Birthday Natalie!

My little baby is all grown up. Sniff. Well, just a little more grown up I suppose. Here is her birthday post. We had just a little birthday party with our family members. She had a great time!
I put ribbon in her hair as incentive to be able to do her hair. She is resisting that these days.

She got some fun presents from her loving family. Here is the little nail polishes she got from Mel. They dry super fast, thank goodness.

She requested yellow cupcakes with blue frosting. She also helped sprinkle them. As excited as she was to blow out candles, she got super bashful and shy when everyone was singing to her, so she stared at her cupcake instead of looking at the camera.

Getting a little too close to the flame for my liking. Guess we needed a little more blowing practice. Brooklyn was really excited about blowing out candles, so we lit one in her cupcake to blow out too. So cute!

Enjoying her spoils. Photos courtesy of Mark, btw.

The girls gobbling up their goods.

We had her two year check up today. She is 36 in tall (3 feet!) which is the 95th percentile, and 30lbs which is 75th I believe. She's always been tall; guess she takes after her daddy.

These have been the most life changing two years of my life. I have learned so much by being a mommy to Natalie. She is learning so much every day, and her imagination is really taking off. She speaks in complete sentences now, leaving out words like the, her, his, and, etc. Here's an example of how she talks: "Natalie, Hannah, Mommy, Daddy go doctor now car. Daddy hold Natalie, Mommy hold Hannah. Doctor man glasses, no hair. Doctor look Natalie eyes, nose, mouth, ears, heartbeat." It's so funny what she comes up with and what words she says that we didn't even know she knew. For example, she was talking about her hair being wet (it had chapstick in it) and I asked her why her hair was wet. She said, "Natalie take bath yesterday." I didn't even know she knew "yesterday." She also sings songs all the time. She has the ABC's nearly down, as well as Jingle Bells, Twinkle twinkle, Old MacDonald, Popcorn popping, and others. I just love hearing my child sing! And her pitch is pretty good, too. :-)

Here's an example of how she is starting to use her imagination a lot more. She was eating lunch and had some slices of apples and cheese. She decided one of her slices of cheese was baby Jesus, and two apples were Mary and Joseph. She put baby Jesus to bed on a napkin, and then made the mommy apple give the baby a "love" and sing songs to the baby. Halfway through she decided the apple was now a cow and started mooing. Also, yesterday we went to get her up from her nap and she put her legs through the bars and said she was swinging. So cute!

Anyway, I could go on and on, as I'm sure every mother can do. We just love her so much and are so grateful for her in our family. What a special girl!