All about Nora

I promised to make a post about the things Nora has been doing and saying lately. She turned 23 months on July 18, so she is headed full speed ahead towards her second birthday! We have been talking to her about birthdays and trying to explain that hers is coming up, but I'm not quite sure she gets it yet. A friend of hers, Ruby, had her first birthday party a couple of weeks ago and that's probably been Nora's most memorable experience with a birthday so far. She thought that was really neat and I'm sure she will love her own party when it happens in a few weeks.

I think that Nora's a great little communicator. I'd say that I understand her the best since I spend the most time with her. She can express most of her basic wants and needs and usually speaks in 2-4 word sentences. She'll say things like, "Yo Yo Baby (yogurt) yummy, Mommy!" or "Car seat hot, no!" She likes going to church and knows that's where we're "Quiet, shh!" although actually being quiet in church is more of a challenge. She has a whole cast of characters she plays with at home, mostly stuffed animals. She has names for all of them, but with a few exceptions the names are pretty simple - Pig ("Peeg!"), Rabbit, Bunny, Baby, etc. Puppy Knee is a stuffed puppy she got from Build a Bear a few months ago. She also has Mommy Puppy Sam-u-el, which is my old toy, Samuel Spaniel. One night last week she woke up screaming "Mommy Puppy Sam-u-ellllll!" over and over again. Jason went in to her room, changed her diaper, and found MPS and gave him back to her. This was the wrong thing to do because she freaked out. I think she'd actually had a bad dream about MPS, but she couldn't really explain that to us. We brought her to our room and she spent the rest of the night with us, sleeping peacefully.

Another thing she's been doing recently that I think is neat is recognizing places out of the car window when we're driving. She can point out the library (and she knows that's where we go to get books), the church, home, and Daddy's work. She has also recognized places, like my grandmother's house, in photos. She loves looking at pictures and will ask to see pictures of "No' baby" (she still can't pronounce "Nora") with some of her favorite people. She loves books and has a nice collection now, plus we take a few books out from the library every week. Some of her current favorites are Yoko, Flora's Blanket, Hop on Pop ("Hop Pop!"), and Goodnight Moon. I was pretty stubborn about not letting her watch TV when she was younger, but I have been letting her watch some shows on PBS Kids lately. Her favorites seem to be Super Why, Curious George, and Between the Lions.

Brag time: she started learning her ABCs in mid-April and had them down by the end of May. She can now point to any capital letter of the alphabet and name it, and recently she's started to learn the lowercase letters. We simply checked out a book from the library about the ABCs and she got very interested right away, wanting to read the book over and over again until she had learned them all. She can do a little bit of the ABC song, but she's not much of a singer right now. She's starting to learn to say her numbers; we've heard her go up to six or eight, but I don't think she really understands "counting" yet. She's also starting to learn the sounds that letters make, like "Buh" for B, etc. Like all parents, we are very proud of our little girl! It's so fun to watch her learn more about the world. You often hear about the "terrible twos," and there are definite times of frustration for Mommy, Daddy, and Nora. We get tantrums sometimes, and she seems to have inherited a stubborn streak from one or maybe both of her parents. :) But overall, we are really enjoying having a toddler. She brings us so much joy, every single day. We are so glad that Nora is our daughter.