Budding brilliance

Willa has always been very verbal, preferring long sentences to short utterances.  She also has a very good memory, and has recently been demonstrating this through singing songs.  Last night she surprised me by insisting that she get to read "The Duckling Gets a Cookie" from Mo Willems' pigeon book series.  I decided to let her turn the pages and point out what she saw, since this is our usual routine when she "reads" a book, but to my shock and delight, she was able to recite every page!  And I mean it, I'm not embellishing out of pride or parental bragging, she touched on every page and recited how she remembered us reading it.  I tried to prompt her to recreate it today, but of course once the video is running she gets distracted by her own ankle and isn't as fluid, but I was still impressed!

Check it out!

Easter 2016

Willa is really starting to get excited about holidays!  To get ready for the holiday we started reading books about Easter and watching a couple of Easter DVDs from the library.  She definitely wanted to dye eggs!

She was excited to color eggs and to wear a poofy dress, but I'm not sure she knew about the basket part.  So it was lovely to see how happy she was to open her basket first thing in the morning.

The major themes were Doc McStuffins and Frozen, with a little Paw Patrol and Hello Kitty for good measure.  She loved every piece and spent time enjoying each new thing.  The only thing that didn't really get her attention was the candy, but it may be because we only got her some M'Ms and marshmallows.

We went to church as usual, where Willa got to do a basement egg hunt, thanks to the rainy weather.  She was quite the little hunter, although we showed up late so she only got to hunt a little.  Luckily, the organizers were very thoughtful and set up a few more eggs for her to hunt solo, so she didn't totally miss the fun.

What a fun Easter Sunday!

Willa's second birthday

So it has taken me far too long to post this, but here are some pictures from Willa's second birthday party.

Since her favorite show is Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood, it was an easy choice for the theme.  I had been planning this for about six months, and over the last three weeks I started assembling and hanging decorations.  I ordered the birthday cake and decided to buy a chicken nugget tray to save time, but other than that I put everything together with the help of Aunt Katie and Willa's godmother Sandi.  I particularly liked how cute the tiger balloons that Sandi made turned out!

Since I knew there would be about nine toddlers in attendance, I decided to arrange centers based on the various characters from the show.  That way, the kids could spread out and explore at their leisure without them necessarily grouping into an uncontrollable toddler melee.  It seemed to work very well!  The only center that didn't get a lot of attention was the coloring pages and the blocks.  The music and the cookie decorating were the biggest hits!

Such a beautiful day, and big thanks to Sandi for taking such amazing photographs!