Fun around the house

Our baby has turned into a toddler right before our eyes. She loves to run and is learning how to climb on everything.....up and down stairs, on furniture and of course, on mommy and daddy. She doesn't say too many words yet but is learning word/thing association which is beginning to help with her communication frustration. She can say "na na" (for banana) and asks for bananas all day long. I'm glad they are a healthy food! She has been saying dada for months now but has not uttered one lone mama....poor mommy! She also says "hot" when she sees steam and "dog" - she loves dogs. The words don't come out perfect yet but she says them in her own little cute way and likes any word that has a "t" or "k" in it. I think she likes the staccato in her mouth. So she trys to say works like "sock" or "that" but we often only hear the consonant at the end. At least she is giving it a try.

Another new thing we have introduced is cow's milk. I am still nursing so we are able to introduce it slowly. At first she did not like the taste but has slowly grown accustomed to it and will now drink about 5 oz of it a day. She LOVES to drink anything out of a straw so that has helped by making it a fun thing to do. What we will usually do is give her a fruit/milk smoothie in the afternoons to boost her milk intake and this is her favorite snack of the day. This day we had given her a very blue smoothie of blackberries and blueberries. As you can tell, she liked it!

We took this movie after the blue smoothie. She was playing with daddy's cell phone and we decided to call it to she what she would do. The result was pretty funny!

One of Maya's favorite things to do lately is play outside and fortunately we have had some great weather for it. She explored our backyard in stages. Although she tends to be quite brave and inquisitive, she does like to be thorough before moving on to something new. So for about a day, she took her time enjoying the first level of our deck - which is large but certainly not big or interesting enough to occupy someone for an entire day...even a little someone - at least I didn't think it was. However, Maya was quite happy to walk the deck, peeking into the windows of the house, checking out the flower pots, smelling the potted cedars, pushing around her car and walking in endless circles around the patio furniture. Once she had that figured out, the next day she ventured onto the second level of the deck to continue her window peeking, inspecting more flower pots and cedars and again almost making herself dizzy walking in circles around the other patio furniture. We had tried once or twice to take her out into the grass but, in true Maya style, she protested I'm sure trying to tell us that she was not ready. You can't make that girl do anything she doesn't want to. So finally, she was ready to move from the deck out into the wild, green yonder that is our backyard. And now it's her favorite place to be. She runs around in the grass, or we push her in her new car and she is in heaven. Green things are started to shoot up from our flower beds and we intend on filling up our flower pots this weekend. It will be a wonderful summer! Here Maya is riding around the lawn with daddy. We had a gorgeous day on Saturday and spent most of the day outdoors. These were taken at around 8:00am on Saturday...it was already so warm out.

Spring is finally here and we have been taking full advantage of it. We have had a few deck parties and enjoy so much having friends over for a cocktail or two to enjoy the beautiful weather. Last night we had our first thunderstorm of the year. It rained at about 8pm and was finished by 10pm and we woke up to another beautiful day. I will take that kind of weather any day. Here are some pictures of the rainbow that came after the storm. it spaned across the entire sky. I hadn't seen one like that in a very long time.

I hope you are enjoying Spring as much as we are. Maya and I will be flying to Saskatchewan next week to visit family so if you are around, we would love to see you.