Rhyan: 22 months old!

Rhyan turned 22 months old on Feb 28th! WOW! I really cannot believe that in less than 2 months now, she'll be two YEARS old. Where has the time gone?!

I am absolutely in love with this age. Rhyan's personality has really come out recently and she is very playful! The "language explosion" month was this past month for her, for sure. I'm sure that from here on out she will be adding words like crazy, but this month marked a difference in language development in her for sure. I simply cannot remember all of the words/phrases she says now! But there are alot :-)

She is super bossy to spud. She continues to call him "puh" with an occasional "d" on the end. He comes running to her anytime she calls, though, so i guess he's figured out that "puh" is his new name. She loves to love on him for a brief moment and then promptly instructs him to get "DOW!" (down). She loves bossing him around. And he doesnt seem to mind. Amazing.

With Rhyan's increase in vocab, she has this past month also started to experience nightmares. According to a patient of mine who is a pediatrician, this is very common at this age. She said that as their language skills expand, they become more creative and imaginative therefore leading to more creative, and sometimes scary, dreams. She cries out in her sleep sometimes as many as four times a night. This started right at a month ago, i think. It scared us to death to start with... wondering what was happening... was it that jeff was gone a good bit b/c of baseball? was it that she was eating something that was hurting her stomach at night? But my patient assured me that this is just normal and there is really nothing to be done. We do try to make sure that her last 15 minutes before bed are very calm now and very consistent so as to calm her mind (hopefully) as much as possible. We also pray and ask the Lord to protect her little mind. Overall, they have improved UNLESS we get her to bed later than normal. A late bedtime seems to trigger the nightmares, which i also understand to be normal. The great thing about Rhyan though is that she doesnt require any attention to get herself back to sleep. She works through it on her own in less than a minute, on average, and is right back in snoozeville :-)

We bought a potty this month, just to have. She goes to it quite often and says "i poo poo" and sits on it. But she doesnt actually want to poo poo on the potty. She just wants to imitate at this point. Believe me, i know. We experimented. :-) So, for now, it's there for her to know that it's available. I won on the babywise blog contest the "pottytraining 1-2-3" book and dvd by the Ezzo's (who wrote babywise) and am looking forward to reading that. But she's definitely not ready yet, and i see no need to push it. Changing one kids diaper or two kids diaper just doesnt seem that big a deal to me. Yes, i'd love to not have to buy two sizes/boxes of diapers and spend all of that money, but i'd rather have my sanity. So i'll wait till she's really ready. Because i'm just lazy like that!

Whinyness is the bane of my existence... and apparently what Rhyan lives to do recently! :-( I thought maybe it was b/c she wasnt doing independent play time so if you remember, we started back with that in Jan. She's gotten a LOT better with that this past month for the most part. She still has some crazy fake cries from time to time, but overall, its a vast improvement. Then, i thought maybe it was her teeth, but drugging her with motrin doesnt seem to help (no, i'm not above trying to medicate my kid to see if pain is the issue!). So as late as yesterday, Tracy just tried stopping her every time she whined and saying "no whining, use your words" and making her ask for what she wanted. So far (for 2 days) it seems to be helping!. Not that we havent tried that in the past, but i think in the past we've done a combo of ignoring it and addressing it... so now we'll try consistently addressing it and see if that works.

The fabulous spring-like weather has really been great for us! Rhyan LOVES the "outside" and would live out there if i'd let her, i think! We've had a blast just walking around the yard, playing with toys, chalk and going to the playground.

Rhyan is quite playful at mealtimes recently. She loves to "hide" her fork under her arm, behind her head, under her leg, etc... and wait for us to make a big deal about "Where is your fork, Rhyan???". Then she'll bring it out and say "dere-id-is!" (there it is).

She's obsessed with putting her shoes on and off and taking her socks off 1000x's a day to check her toes to see if there is any "yuck" in them. It's cute. If not sometimes annoying :-)

To anyone who coughs or sneezes or clears their throat, she promptly tells them "bosh you".
She says "tan-too" (thank you) for almost anything you give her, including food.
Her favorite thing to ask for is "ont nak" (i want snack).
And her favorite word/person of the month is TRACY! Lorddy, she loves her some "taa-cee".
She is very sad that the "boat" that was for sale on our road sold and is no longer there for her to point out to me every time we leave the neighborhood.
She still loves to read and points to literally probably a hundred things in the books and says what they are or what noise they make.
Most larger animals to her (goats, horses, cows, sheep) are all cows in person. She knows the difference in books, but hasnt seen most of the animals in person, so she doesnt know what they should really look like. Looks like a trip to the yellow river game ranch could help with that! :-)

Life is fantastic. She knows there is a "ba-bee" in my belly and pats it and loves on it often. But i'm pretty sure she doesnt really have a clue as to what is coming to live with us in 3 months! She also knows his name is Mack, although for her it's "matt" or "nak". We cant seem to get the "m" and "k" together :-)

I'm sure there are tons of things i'm missing... but really, she's great.