Twenty One Months

After Emeline turned 1, I backed off to 3 month updates instead of monthly ones. But as I reflected on what I would write now that she is 21 months, I just felt overwhelmed. It seems like the last few months she has really grown up a lot. Of course she is still a rambunctious toddler, but she is constantly surprising me with how much she knows about the world and with her amazing personality. Sometimes I feel like I hardly know her because she is changing so quickly.

Emeline is still a runner and a climber, but now is just incredibly fast. We had a moment on a recent trip where we realized she could open the hotel door because it was a pull down handle. So while we were in the room, we kept the safety latch on. But when Wes and I were getting ready in the morning, I heard a door close, and I looked at the main door and the latch was open. So I burst out the front door with wet hair, running around our hotel floor to find her. In fact, she had not left the room, but what I heard was the bedroom door closing, and I ran around the whole floor for nothing, but honestly, she is that fast, and I wouldn't put it past her.

Emeline's zest for life is really breathtaking these days. She is overjoyed to do many things she loves, especially sing and dance, and she shows it with lots of clapping and "yays". She claps with a "yay" when songs end, when you arrive at a destination, you name it. It never ceases to make me smile, even if the event is rather ordinary. I love her joyous perspective on things, it is infectious.

Emeline's language continues to grow exponentially. I was keeping a language diary, but during our move it got misplaced, and now as I'm trying to catch up with the new words she knows, it's almost impossible. She doesn't always articulate each word clearly, but I think I hear a new word almost every day. She's also started to pronounce the ends of words more clearly. She mostly says the first part of the word, such as 'da' for 'down' or 'pa' for 'park'. But now she more clearly says 'down' and 'pak' (the r sound is still hard). She's also working on multisyllable words like 'pitcha' for 'picture', 'paka' for 'pocket', 'bucka' for 'buckle', etc. And now we've got lots more multiple word phrases such as 'down Papa' for 'sit down Papa', 'no more cheese', 'bye bye park', etc. I'm impressed with her but, I guess I'm supposed to be.

She can also point out most of her body parts when asked, make lots more animal sounds, and she even follows instructions better. So now I know, comprehension is not much of an issue, but if she doesn't listen she's probably too excited or her strong little will is getting involved.

Without further ado, here are some recent pictures of my little E monster devouring a bowl of strawberries. Enjoy!

Christmas

We started of our Christmas celebrations with a Christmas Eve dim sum with some families from our small group who were still in town. Dim Sum is always a festive occasion...and yummy!

Then we let the kids run around the mall to burn off energy before nap time.

In the evening, we headed to church with my grandparents. Emeline really loved the music, and danced and clapped with a wild "Yay!!!" at the end of ever song. Even the quite contemplative ones when no one else clapped. We love how much she loves music.

Then we headed back to Uncle John and Aunt Pilar's place for some pictures and presents.

Emeline really got into opening presents this year.

She loved her books from Aunt Tracey!

Then we headed home, got Emeline to bed, and set up the presents she'd get on Christmas morning. I realized this felt like the first year we were putting on Christmas for her. It was fun. Emeline got lots of physically big presents this year from her family. So we couldn't wrap much, so I put big bows on her play things in the living room. This is what she would awake to in the morning.

The next morning, when she got up, I waited to take pictures of her reaction coming into the family room. Here she is. At first just wondering what is going on.

Then getting excited!

Then diving in to enjoying the new toys!

She even wanted to sit in her wagon to open up more presents.

We got Emeline a play kitchen, and Grandma Chris furnished all the play cookware and food. Emeline unwrapped it and said all the names of the food she knew, and put each one in her mouth. It was super cute. I got a great video, but my phone crashed and didn't save it. But here's a photo of her tasting the veggies.

And cooking away.

Then we went over to Aunt Diane and Uncle Miles' for Christmas brunch. We got her all dressed in the cute outfit from Grandma Chris, but as soon as she saw the camera, Emeline threw a tantrum cause we wouldn't let her see the pictures. So I didn't get a good one of her in the outfit, but I did get this.

And a nice picture of the two of us.

More presents at Aunt Diane's, and Emeline loved it.

We are so grateful for our generous family and friends and for the birth Jesus to celebrate this year.

Decorating for Christmas

Our house doesn't look too much like Christmas this year because we are still in boxes from the move and trying to get organized, but we did manage to put up our little fake tree, and I even bought us a wreath to help the house smell nice. Last year, Emeline had a great time playing with ornaments while we put up the tree. This year, we tried to get her a bit more involved, but instead of putting ornaments on the tree, she just pulled off as we put them on. So most of our decorating efforts happened after she went to bed. But here are some photos as we put up our tree.

Dancing with Papa

Bethlehem

This year, our friend Elizabeth invited us to visit Bethlehem. Every year, a church in Santa Clara builds up a replica of Bethlehem and puts on a live demonstration of the Christmas story starting with of Joseph and Mary signing the census, searching for a room at the inn, and ending in the birth of Jesus. It's really neat to walk around the city, see the guards, vendors in time specific garb, and even watch a parade of belly dancers and animals, including a camel!, with the three wise men come in to Bethlehem to greet the baby Jesus.

We all had a rough week, including all of us having the flu, and ending with a fever and head cold for Emeline, but we still wanted to get out and experience the joy of Christmas despite our difficult circumstances. So we bundled up Emeline in the stroller and off we went!

My pictures don't do it justice, night time photos are the hardest, especially in a crowd. But here are a few to give you an idea, but it's really something neat to see in person.

Outside the city walls...

An inn inside the city.

The roman guard telling us to line up and take the census.

Up close with a guard.

The angel proclaiming the birth of Jesus.

Mary singing to Jesus.

All our busyness, moving, and sickness has made it hard to get into the Christmas spirit, but we're hoping to be healthy for the next few weeks and enjoy celebrating the birth of Jesus.

Thanksgiving

Since we had moved less than a week prior, we were very glad to have an invitation to Thanksgiving with my Aunt Diane and Uncle Miles and family. We were in no state at our new house to cook. Diane and Miles always put on a very delicious and traditional Thanksgiving dinner. It has been a few years since we were able to attend, so we enjoyed ourselves that much more.

Emeline enjoyed the food too, and she had fun playing with both her cousins, but I only got a picture of her with Nicole.

She also really loves Uncle Miles and Aunt Diane, but again, only got one photo. Emeline is distracted, but I love this picture because of Miles' smile. Emeline used to be afraid of him, but now she goes up to him for help playing with all sorts of things.

Emeline also has a love/fear relationship with dogs, and Jesse and Nicole's dog Sam was no exception. She really enjoyed him when he was on the other side of the glass.

We tried to get some outdoor photos of Emeline in her cute outfit, but she was too distracted to sit still for long.

And it was equally difficult to get a family photo, but here are our best shots.

Children's Museum

To help us out during our move, Grandma Chris came down from Oregon for a week. It was such a blessing to have her here to help with Emeline while we got lots of stuff done. One day we needed to be out of the house for some work to get done, so we took the opportunity to go to the Children's Museum. I'd heard there were some good things for kids Emeline's age, but we hadn't gone yet. Here are some highlights:

Emeline like climbing on and inside all the large vehicles they had. Firetruck...

I think this was an ambulance. This older boy was nice and played with her.

She was a little wary of the water play area at first. She didn't like having to wear the cover up, and we there weren't enough of the toddler ones, so she had a big kids one on.

But after a while she did have fun playing in the different portions of the exhibit.

Emeline's absolute FAVORITE part of the museum was the dance room. They had a large room with disco lights and loud music, all different kinds from salsa to rock, for kids to just run around and dance. Emeline just busted a move in there. Here are a couple of photos, but you've got to watch the videos at the bottom. It's really dark and hard to see, but if you watch closely you can see her little silhouette shaking her booty!