Staceytown: January

We kicked off January by having Christmas with the local side of my family. Josie really seemed to get this whole present thing by our third iteration of Christmas this year, and helped to unwrap everyone else's presents too... including some for the new baby, which she promptly declared as "mines".

[Stringing beads with Aunt Emily]

[Wearing her new hat and owl puppet]

So, a note about Josie's outfit in the previous pictures - she started picking her own clothes out a few weeks back, and she definitely likes to dress all in one color... too bad head-to-toe not-quite-matching colors looks a bit ridiculous, so we've been trying to steer her away from all orange or all purple outfits (her favorites) when possible, with varying success. We also made the mistake of calling her a grape during one of her all-purple days, and she swiftly corrected us, stating "I not a grape! I a big sister!" Duly noted.

Speaking of being a big sister, we finally got Josie's "big girl room" done in advance of her little sibling's arrival. Most of it we'd already gotten in place over the last few months, so it was really just finishing the wall where her dresser is. So some of her pictures moved to the baby's room, and then we put up her new owl print and mirror (that is at just the right height for her to sing and dance to her reflection), and did wall decals for the tree (with pictures of family and friends) and butterflies.

Josie had her 2.5-year doctor's appointment last month, and she is now all done with her vaccinations for at least the next year and a half. She didn't even cry with the two shots she got, although she almost did later since I asked her about them and she got quite worked up that her "sticker" (band-aid) had been thrown away. She's in the 90th percentile for height and weight, so while she's ever so slowly edging down from being off the charts, she's also still one of the biggest kids in her class of 2.5-3 year olds. Her 2-year molars are also finally coming through, with the first one starting to cut through a few weeks ago.

Josie has started bringing some of her school routines home with her. For a few days, her favorite game in the evenings was to put Ryan and me to bed, which involved her gathering pillows and blankets for us, directing us where to lay down (luckily, she took pity on me and demanded I lay on the couch rather than on the floor with Ryan), and then reading us books and patting us on the shoulder. For whatever reason, the books she chose for this activity were not exactly picture books: Huck Finn and Pudd'nhead Wilson. So she'd basically tell us the title, and then go through the stories, which sounded suspiciously like "Pat-a-cake" and various other rhymes ;)

[Reading a book to us]

She is also experimenting with modifying the lyrics to songs now ("Jump, horsie, jump a little higher," "The daddy on the bus wash the spoon"), and is learning how to ask for things more nicely. We've been working on "please" and "thank you" and asking for things in a normal tone of voice rather than overly melodramatic whining (as it turns out, this drives me crazy), so that's actually going pretty well so far. Strangely enough, one of the things Josie asks for pretty frequently is hot sauce, which she appears to like for the most part (she does have her limits), although it definitely leads to an increase in her milk consumption too. She also likes to request that we put music on so she can dance to it, although that usually just means running in a circle :)