ABCs

I have been embarrassingly behind posting current videos.

And it's really a shame because she's been doing a lot of really cute/awesome stuff over the past few months.

Like learning the ABCs, check it out!

But you'll get the drift after 30 seconds, I only posted the whole version because I know there are grandparents out there who will want to see the whole thing.

Again a moment where we show her to the universe and say, "LOOK!  We made a person!  And she knows letters!!"

She's come an awfully long way...we love it.

Mother's Helper

I can see how an actual Mother's Helper would be awesome.

Lucky for me, I've got one built into the family.

She loves to cook, clean and organize things just right.

Of course, safety comes first.

Now she's all ready.

(Whenever she sees me pull out a pair of oven mitts, she has to have some, too.  And they have to be these two.  We have a set of each one, and I store them on two different hooks but she has to have the ones that come from a specific side.  No joke.  Whatever floats yer boat, I guess, kid.)

Daddy's Girl

Kendra went down about half an hour ago and we could hear her making quite a ruccus over our movie, so I went back to check on her after it kept getting more and more persistent.

However, when I got to her door, I could hear her better and she wasn't just calling out randomly like she normally does, oh no.

"DA-DDY!"

And then again a second later, "DA-DDYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!"

Turns out, silly old Mommy had forgotten to hand her the special Mermaid book she likes to look at when she goes to bed but before she goes to sleep, so she called out for Daddy to get the job done right.

Naaice.

Our little stepper

Kendra is no stranger to step aerobics--I've been doing it several times a week most weeks of her life.  At our last apartment in Chicago, we had the step set up all the time unless we needed the floor space to do something else.  This lead to a pretty natural curiosity about it which I documented here and here.

However...

Last week, she decided to give it a try for herself.

She actually did this for a good 15 minutes and even ran to go grab her tennis shoes when she noticed that I and the girls in the video were all wearing them.

Besides being cute, I was also happy because hopefully from watching stuff like me doing step all the time, she'll develop her own appreciation and maybe even passion for some form of physical activity.

As long as she has fun doing it, that is.

But right now, she seems to have that covered.  :)

Uncaptured cuteness

It's difficult to get a video of this particular Kendra-ism, but it's pretty dang cute.

Lately, when she makes a request, she'll say it at a normal or even slightly louder-than-normal volume.

And if the answer is, "No," then she tries again, but in a whisper.

So it goes something like this:

Kendra:  "MOMMY!  May I have this, please?" (in her own way, she's not nearly that articulate--don't we wish she were...)

Mommy:  "No, honey.  Not right now.  But maybe later."

Kendra:  "Mommy...may I have this, please...?"

Mommy:  "No, sweetheart, we're not going to do that."

Kendra:  "Please...?"



It's so  darn cute that I have to keep myself from laughing...but the answer is still, "No."

The Artist in the family

Kendra draws on her chalkboard every single day.

And she turns to us and asks us to draw something for her...

Every.  Single.  Day.

I often draw letters or objects when I get handed the chalk, but Grant often does family portraits.

And she totally caught on...(I recommend clicking to enlarge these pictures as you scroll down)

Do you see it?  It's like those 3D pictures that were so popular a while back--gotta try to see the hidden image...

Here, I'll help.

Eh?

(I drew the heart, and she took it from there.  But we know it's me because she said so.)

Not bad for a barely 2-year-old, eh?

While this was something we noticed after she went to bed, she's done it many times since and she's turned to us and pointed out "eye", "nose" and "mouth", so we're pretty sure she's doing this on purpose.

Our own little Rembrandt!

Starting them young

Recently I set a goal to read the Book of Mormon through by Easter--and it's certainly a manageable goal, but it does mean I need to stay on top of it every day to get it done.

So if Kendra gets up before I've had a chance to read, I have to get that time in while she's up and eager to play...which I do for a while and then try to explain that Mommy needs some time for something important.  She's surprisingly accommodating, as long as she can do it too, of course.

Some time last year, she was curious about what I was doing one day when I pulled out my scriptures so we dug out my pocket-sized copy of the Book of Mormon and gave it to her.

Now she has her own scriptures and I have mine...she knows they're about "Jee-jee" (Jesus) and she points out lots of letters on the cover and on the pages that she's learned over the past couple of months (we're *this close* to her actually recognizing that the letters b-o-o-k put together is the word "book", it's pretty cool).

It'll still be a while before she can take a turn by herself when we read together as a family, but she still looks darn cute pretending to on her own.