After looking back at her 2-year-old height and weight, we realized that Natalie has grown 3 inches in 6 months and gained less than a pound, which confirmed our suspicion that Natalie’s gotten taller and skinnier.

Obviously, she takes after her dad!

But, there are some things she gets from mom. Like the ability to curl her tongue:

Her communication skills are quite remarkable. She absorbs new vocabulary faster than we can keep track of and sometimes comes out with a (correctly used but often mispronounced) word that astounds us. For example a few weeks ago, she said to Chris, “I have sunglasses and you have ‘perstiption’ glasses.” Yesterday we were teaching her the word ferocious and giving examples of all the things that can be ferocious, like lions, dinosaurs, and bears. Natalie caught on right away and exclaimed, “yeah, and monsters are ferocious, too!”

She picks up on phrases that adults use and turns them around on us, much to our amusement. Some of our favorite quotes from the past three months:

“Mommy, whad’I tell you about the ketchup?!?”

“Daddy, finish your food and then talk!”

Having Natalie in a daycare setting with a mixed aged group of kids continues to work beautifully. Natalie is learning things that I doubt she would have the opportunity to learn if she were with children all her own age. Many of the things that Melissa teaches the kids during circle time are for the benefit of her 4-year-old son, Mikey, to prepare him for kindergarten. Natalie has been keeping up with him quite a lot. For example, Natalie has her complete address memorized, minus the zip code. She’s been spelling her name for a while now. And because she wants to learn to do all the things that Mikey does, she started writing her name, too:

Natalie’s sleeping habits are getting better and better. Since our last quarterly report, Natalie sleeps most nights from bedtime (which varies greatly depending on whether she’s napped, how active the day/evening is, etc) until early morning, when she comes into our bed around 6 am. Then she sleeps another couple of hours and we often have to wake her up for the day. When she wakes up in the middle of the night, it’s so jarring that I find myself thanking my lucky stars that nightwakings seem to be the exception rather than the rule. There are even days where she sleeps the entire night in her own bed and we have to go into her room to wake her up. I’m not sure how, but we managed to survive having a child that did not consistently sleep through the night until just before she turned 2 ½!

As wonderful as Natalie is, the challenges she presents us with this quarter are trying our patience. The main challenges are her dilly-dallying and whining. We haven’t figured out a way to motivate Natalie to do things quickly. There are plenty of things that she is capable of doing pretty fast (and of course insists on doing herself) that she takes her sweet time doing. Getting into the car is a daily battle. She likes to climb into the car and her car-seat herself, and while I’m glad for her to have this bit of autonomy, we got places on time more often when I just plopped her in the seat. This morning I lost my patience and snapped at Natalie to hurry up and go upstairs to get something (something that she insisted that she needed before we could leave). Of course this did not result in getting the task accomplished any faster. The result was that I felt guilty and irritated with myself and that Natalie sat on the bottom step of the stairs and whined, “Daaaaaady, Mommmmmmy yeeeeeellllled at me!!”

The whining. Oh, the horrible whining. Half the time I suspect that she does it simply because she enjoys modulating her voice, because she knows full well that she will be ignored until she uses her “sweet” voice. And yet I have a sinking suspicion that we’re inadvertently reinforcing the behavior, because it’s not stopping!

Of course all 2 ½-year-olds try their parents’ patience, and I feel lucky that (knock on wood) Natalie has not presented us with any true behavior problems, like biting or the like. Even considering the issues I mentioned, we find Natalie to be a pleasure to know and are so proud to see what a wonderful little girl she is growing up to be.

Chris took this picture of Natalie jumping at the Philly Zoo yesterday. I think it captures her growing adventurousness and the incredible excitement she experiences over the simple joys in life:

Natalie is learning at such a rate it’s hard to keep up. She uses words like “fragile,” “underneath,” “carefully,” “pretend,” and “gently” in the right contexts. During dinner, she almost invariably says, “Thank you for making such a delicious dinner, Mommy!” (or sometimes Daddy). She can sing along to every word of the entire album Whaddya Think of That? by Laurie Berkner. She can spell the words Natalie, Mommy, and Daddy. She can write the letter N.

In terms of her physical development, Natalie learned to gallop like a horse. We are always amazed at her strength in terms of how much she can carry around.

Natalie drew this picture of Meema, complete with eyes, a nose (a letter N), hair, cheeks (straight lines on either side of the eyes), a mouth, and a neck (line going down the middle):

Since giving up her precious baba a few days ago, Natalie’s been eating like crazy! We’re happy that she’s getting more of a variety of nutrients from food rather than filling up on milk. The downside of giving up the baba is that she’s having trouble falling asleep at night. And she’s still getting up in the middle of the night. Chris has taken over all the nighttime parenting, and we think we’re moving in the right direction. Someday she’s gotta sleep through the night!

UPDATE: Natalie slept in her own bed from 9:30 to 6:30 last night!!!! Too bad I kept waking up thinking something was terribly wrong…but I stopped myself from checking on her and waking her up. Not going to make that mistake again!

Natalie eating breakfast, something she was never really interested in doing before we took away the baba. Mmmmmm, apples:

Natalie’s sense of humor is growing more complex. This week Natalie pointed to me and exclaimed, “You’re Natalie!” Then she pointed to herself and said, “And I’m Mommy!” She also likes to look at me with authority and say “Can you say [nonsense word]??”

One of her favorite things to do lately is sing Happy Birthday. She sings to everyone in the room at that moment, then moves on to singing to family and friends, then insists we sing to inanimate objects. So far, we’ve sung Happy Birthday to Natalie’s blue hat, her black beans, her red peppers, and her water. When the song is over, she offers whoever she sang to some cake to eat. The video is dark because before she sings, she has to turn the lights off, of course!

Happy Birthday, dear red peppers! from nataliecaroline on Vimeo.

Happy 2¼ Birthday, Natalie! We love you!