Abbie Rose is 2.5 years old!!

Sometimes I can’t believe I’m lucky enough to be this little girls mom.  She has brought so much joy to Mark’s and my life that, at times, we don’t even remember what life was like before she came long.  I could sit and stare at her all day and her perfection amazes me.

Abbie has changed quite a bit in the past few months.  Her vocabulary is far above most kids her age and most people don’t believe me when I tell them she’s two and a half.  Their next question is always “When is her birthday?” so they can do the calculating themselves.  This past month, I got her off the bottle (WOOHOO!!!) and we also moved her to a big girl bed.  (More on that in a different post.)

Abbie has started pretending quite a bit recently.  She loves dragging her stuffed animals all over the place, and she puts bibs on them all and lines them all up at her little table in her room and feeds them.  And then she’ll stuff about 14 of them into her tiny doll stroller and take them all for a walk.  This obviously makes her much easier to deal with because she’s able to entertain herself for an hour or so at a time.  She also loves looking at books still and asks me to read her about 15 books a day, or she’ll “read” them to herself.  And she’s all about “Olivia”.  She LOVES the TV show “Olivia”.  I got her 2 more “Olivia” dvd’s for Christmas because, quite honestly, I’m tired of watching the same 10 episodes over and over.

Abbie knows all the basic colors now and can pretty much say her ABC’s.  She loves singing songs like Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star and You are my Sunshine.  She can repeat nursery rhymes by herself and we discovered right after we got back from the States that Abbie can say the entire “God is great, God is good” prayer by herself, so she says the prayer for us at dinner every night.  I really need to record that.

I think Abbie is going to be a great big sister.  She loves helping me around the house.  She’ll throw things out for me and pick things up for me, and she’ll go get things that I ask her to get, or put things back.  She can open all the doors now, including unlocking our front door, so she’ll let the dogs in and out for me, or sometimes when I don’t want her to.  (Don’t worry, I have an alarm on it that I set if I’m not right by it to watch her.)  She has no problem opening the fridge and will bring me the milk or juice when she wants more of it.  We’re working with her to not get into the fridge without permission and she’s getting better at listening to us.  She also has no problem whatsoever climbing on to our pub-height kitchen chairs, which freaks me out because I’m afraid she’ll fall.  But she’s pretty careful and hangs on pretty well.  I think we’re going to move her to a booster seat pretty soon because her high chair is getting a little tight.

We’re still working with her on her “strong-willed-ness”.  There are times we’ll ask her to do something and her immediate response is, “No, you do it!”.  She definitely has an agenda of her own and it takes some coercing at times, to get her to do what you want.  She also likes to dictate who does what for her if both Mark and I are around.  Surprisingly, she seems to usually want me to do everything for her.  I thought she would be all about Mark doing everything for her once he got home.  She usually wants Mark to play with her and me to do everything else for her though.  I’m still deciding if we want to try to get her partially potty trained before baby boy arrives or just wait until after he’s here to deal with it.

Abbie still loves all animals.  She’s usually all over Oliver, who in turn is wrinkling his nose as high as it’ll go along with growling with all his might.  Abbie is completely oblivious to it and doesn’t at all hesitate to get right in his face.  She loves looking at and touching bugs (ew) and would spend all day out in the yard if I let her.  She’s been asking a lot about my parents lately.  I usually talk to my parents every day and Abbie will always come running up and ask if she can talk to them.  When I hand her the phone, she’ll start wandering around the house and pointing out everything she sees to them, or she’ll tell them about her day or what we’re planning on doing tomorrow.  And every single time she talks to them she asks when they’re coming to see her.  (She’s talking to my dad in the picture on the right below.)

We’re really excited to see Abbie interact with her baby brother once he arrives.  She often talks about how he’ll be little and she’s big, and she’ll find things that she wants to give baby brother or that she wants to share with him.  I just can’t believe that she’s already two and a half.  I really wish we could just keep her little forever because she’s at a really fun age right now.