Here comes Peter Cottontail

Alyssa is sooooo excited about Easter. She can remember the Easter Bunny coming last year and finding eggs filled with candy. Since I put out the Easter decorations a week or two ago, she's been asking "Is it Easter?"

Last weekend, the Mom's group at the church had an Easter party. Upon arrival, she wanted to go see the Easter Bunny, but she wasn't ready to sit on his lap just yet.



She needed to warm up to the situation. After playing a few games and making a craft, she was ready.



Lauren, on the other hand, wanted nothing to do with that Bunny, despite saying that he goes "hop hop hop". She dug her fingers into my shoulder and kept those legs wrapped tight around me when I tried to put her down on his lap.

From there the girls decorated some Easter egg cookies. You can imagine what the best part was though - eating them! Alyssa ate all of hers and Lauren just at the M&Ms off the top.



They then went down to look for some eggs. Lauren enjoyed picking up any that she could find; Alyssa, on the other hand, would only pick up ones that had something in them. She would shake them and picked out her four eggs very carefully.

We tried for a shot of the girls afterwards and captured these sweet faces.









They had such a great time at the party, and they continued to enjoy playing together and with their other friends.

In a moment

Lauren is in that stage where you can't leave her alone for a moment...you never know what's she's going to get into. And whenever you find her, she's got a grin on her face. Some of her favorite things to get into are the baby bottles still in the one kitchen drawer, the cupboard in the bathroom, the refrigerator, and oh so much more.

In this picture she's feeding her baby after having dug out all the baby bottles.

And in these pictures she got herself ready to go outside for a walk. Meanwhile she stomped all the dirt off her boots while I was trying to get ready for company to come over.




And here we caught her with her hand down her pants.


At day care she's been known to shove that hand down there when her diaper is dirty and then say "Yuck." Yuck is right. A few different nights this week, she's managed to unzip her pajamas and undo her diaper while in her crib at night too. We're going to have to think about this situation...and keep an eye on her!

Bigger and Braver

We, like many others, had a taste of spring this weekend. The sun was shining, the temperatures were warmer, and the winds were blowing. So we took advantage today and walked to/from church, played outside before lunch, and then went to the park after naps. The girls had such a great time at the park. We were there for an hour and a half and they didn't want to leave then.

It was fun to see how much each of them have grown and changed over the winter months, just by watching them play at the park. They both tried out new parts of the jungle gyms.

Lauren actually slid down the slides and she climbed up two different obstacles. We're going to have to keep our eyes on her!





And Alyssa discovered the Fireman's pole. A friend of hers introduced her to it last month on another visit to the park, but she's getting better at it. She loves to slide down, but she knows the mom or dad have to be right there for her to do it.



And both girls enjoyed swinging on the big kid swings. Alyssa is working on learning to pump her legs to keep herself going and Lauren is just learning to hang on!





I love that they're pushing their boundaries and learning to do new things, but our little girls aren't quite as little as they used to be.

The B-I-B-L-E

You know the song, don't you? It's a catchy little number that I can remember singing as a little kid in church. It's one of the songs on the girls' "Sunday School Songs" CD, but a little over a week ago, Alyssa came home singing it from day care as well, and she's continued to sing it. I even started teaching her the signs for the different letters to do as she sings the song. But when she sings it by herself, I just have to laugh because this is her version of it:

The B-I-L-E
I guess that's the book for me
I stand alone on the word of God
The B-I-L-E
Bible! (or Bubble!)

It's too cute because she gets so flustered if you try to correct her, so we just let her sing it as she wants for now. Hopefully God doesn't think it's sacrilege if a 3-year old sings it like this!

"Bimnastics"

This is Alyssa's way of saying "gymnastics". She started taking gymnastics in September at Grand Rapids Gymnastics and she absolutely loves it.

When we started in the fall, she took the Parent and Tot class, which meant that one of us accompanied her each night and helped her do the different activities. It was a nice small class, only five other little girls, and she was the oldest. Her coach told us at the end of the class that she was ready to move on to Tumble Bugs 1, so she started that in January. She loves being a "big girl" and going to class all by herself.

There are two Tumble Bugs classes going on at the same time, and I think there are 7 or 8 kids in Alyssa's class. They do all sorts of fun things in the class to develop their gross motor skills, balance, coordination, and social skills. The do stretches and play games (Duck duck goose, freeze, etc.), but they do all sorts of activities on the equipment as well.

Each week they do some floor exercises - forward and backward somersaults, beginning cartwheels, jumping, etc. Alyssa has come along way in her ability to do the somersaults as you can see in this little video clip.



They also get do fun things on the bars and rings. We didn't realize quite how strong Alyssa was until we could see her pulling her legs up during the different activities. She did a little better at some of this in the last class when we could be right by her to encourage her and remind her what she was to be doing, but she has fun. In this video, she hangs from the rings and then tries to pull herself up on the bars while she's waiting for her coach.



She's brought some of these skills home and has found a new use for the bar on her trampoline. We've had to teach her that she can only go one way when flipping over the bar because if she flips the other way so does the trampoline!



(As a disclaimer, she totally picked out her clothes this day and originally had a black hooded sweatshirt on with it but got hot while jumping.) She loves playing around on the trampoline but you can tell she's in control of what she's doing.

By far her favorite activity is the balance beam. She loves walking on the balance beam, and she was so excited the night they finally got to walk on the big balance beam. This past week, the coach had to tell her to slow down though because she was going too fast.



We've been amazed by what they have the kids doing in the classes. And Alyssa absolutely loves her "bimnastics" class. She looks forward to it each and every Monday night, although she can't always remember what night she goes, so she asks almost every day if she gets to go again. She enjoys her coach and likes to show off the stamps she gets on her hands or feet for doing a good job. And she calls all the other girls her friends even though she just recently learned all of their names

For our part, we continue to encourage her to have fun, listen to her coach, and follow the directions. She is a good listener although she does get a little goofy at times when she sees what the other girls are doing. But as long as she's having fun, that's all that matters!

A word a day

It's funny how different two little girls can be. For as slow as Alyssa was to talk, Lauren is picking up words pretty quickly. And for as soft spoken as Alyssa can be, Lauren can be quiet noisy. She surprises us by all the words that she has in her repertoire and how she says them at just the right moment sometimes. For example, a couple of weeks ago Aaron took the girls to the mall to the play area, and Lauren climbed up on one of the coin-operated rides, looked at Aaron, held her hand out and said "money". She may be little, but you can't get much by her.

Here are some of the words that she says:

Animals: Duck, neigh (for horse), moo (for cow), maa (for sheep and goats), ruff (for dogs), meow (for cats), cheep cheep or fly (for birds), butterfly, sssss (for snake), do do (for rooster, think cock-a-doodle-doo), hoo (for owl), snorting sound (for pigs), oo oo (for monkey), spider, neck (for giraffe), roar (for lion)

Body: eye, nose, mou(th), ear, hair, hand, toes, belly, cheek, neck

People: Ah (for Alyssa), Daddy, Grammy, Poppa, PapPap, Nana, Roo (for Drew), Weh (for Miss Gwen), baby, Ho ho ho (for Santa), Rudolph

Other words: mine, yeah, there, no, bottle, milk, french fry, Rudolph, book, bowl, night night, love you, car, purple, apple, cheese, bib, up, please, down, steps, c'mon, go, cup, beans, pee, poop, please, thank you, night night, hi, hello, bounce, jump, toast, jelly, (peanut) butter, zip, spoon, Elmo, cookie

Geesh, when you write them all down, it seems like a lot, huh? You totally need context though to know what she's saying.

She just recently added love you to her words and we love it! She's so sweet at night time when you say "Love you Lauren" and she responds "o you".

I've included some videos so you can begin to hear her little voice. All of them were taken while reading books. Because of the limitations of video size, I had to break them up into smaller chunks, but they're kind of fun. The ones with animal sounds are from "The Very Busy Spider", an Eric Carle book, and the body video is from "My Nose, My Toes and Me".










One of my favorite times of day is taking the girls to day care in the morning and singing songs. We take turns on who gets to pick the first song, but invariably if Lauren picks the first song it's "Ho" (Heigh ho, heigh ho, it's off to day care we go!), she'll sign all the "ho"s. She'll join in on Alyssa's selection as well though, singing "day" at the appropriate time in "This is the Day". I love to have my girls singing and laughing together, there's little that brings me more joy than just watching them have fun together.

I'm reminded of the two of them laughing the other night at dinner, when Lauren had her finger up her nose (again!). Alyssa said to her "Lauren, stop picking your nose. That's gross!" To which Lauren turned to her, smiled, and pushed that finger up there even higher, which brought more "no's" from Alyssa and more laughter from Lauren. I couldn't help but laugh myself.

She continues to be quite the character, just a happy-go-lucky little girl with a mind of her own and a stubborn streak. If what you want is not what she wants, watch out. She continues to make the silliest faces as you can see in some of the photos that follow.





She might have finally hit a growth spurt; in fact, Aaron thinks she's grown 2 inches since Christmas. This is good seeing as the at the past two doctor's visits they've had to stretch her to get her "on the chart" for height. And even her hair is growing little by little. There's just enough for two pigtails, not necessarily your traditional pigtails, but cute for around the house nonetheless.



Our "little Lauren" really is quite a cutie and quite a character. Words, photos and videos just don't quite do her justice. Despite those trying moments, I wouldn't trade her personality for the world. Just watch out world because she's coming at ya-