There had to be a ninja in there too, thank you big brother. She does everything he does. She loves everything he loves. The reverse is rarely true (unless it involves daddy twirling her around by her feet, then it is always true).
This sweet girl turns in to everyone and everything. Anytime we watch a show or movie it's always something like, "Moana. Me." Anytime we read a book, she is always in it. She's either llama llama or red riding hood or the random hippo giving kisses to it's mother. I just love how our whole family ends up in the story somehow. Today reading Cat in the Hat, she pointed out the little boy and girl as "Shae and me." Daddy was the Cat and I was the mother coming home at the end. There may be occasional fights between her and Shae about who is what character in certain books... "No, I'm the bear!" "Bear, Me!"
Belén is always dressing up. Whatever she can find, she puts on. Joy School at our house is great for her for so many reasons, but mostly because it means she gets to take everyone's shoes and jackets and try them on (while all the 4 year olds freak out at her b/c she is wearing their stuff).
Her current favorite dress up items are these sunglasses--that have been stepped on, hence the missing lenses and crookedness--and her hand-me-down Elsa dress.
She points out anytime someone in a book loses their hat. Which surprisingly, happens A LOT. "Oh no, hat!" she'll say.
I've been worried about her speech, mostly because I'm comparing her to where Shae was at this age (which I know I shouldn't do, but I do). She jabbers all day long, it's just hard to understand actual words. It can be quite frustrating for both of us as she says a word over and over again and I just don't know what it is. With that said, we've noticed recently that she is putting more words together (lots of 2 word phrases and has just started putting 3 words together). She's also a BIT more articulate than she was a few months ago. For example, instead of saying "lana-la-la" for banana she nows says "na-na." She drops or changes most of the endings of words. She says hummey for hummus and opey for open. While not speaking as well as some of her little friends (which has made me feel so bad, like I haven't read to her or spoken to her enough), we see her progressing at her own pace week by week and it's exciting to see her communicate more and more, even if it isn't as quickly as I expected.
She has been saying "Ju" for water for about 6 months now. I'm sure it comes from juice, but it just amazes me that after 6 months of correction, our conversations still always go like this: Ju! You mean WATER. Wah-er!"
The girl has a killer grip and she always goes for the around-the-neck move. It is so hard to get out of that one. She looooooves wrestling. We quite often find Shae under here yelling, "Help! I can't breathe!"
Belén Fun Fact: She ate this entire apple. The ENTIRE apple. The way small children eat apples is fascinating. We waste so much of it.
She is constantly getting in to things. If it's not one thing, it's another. Here she is with my headphones that I had stored away in a drawer. Sometimes I just feel like, what's the point? If I take it away, she'll just find something else.
She loves coloring, painting, and playing with play dough. Things that most kids like I suppose, but she actually sits and does them for quite awhile. Shae has such a short attention span with these kinds of things so it's fun to see her color and color and color.
I'll give you one chance to guess which brush was hers.
This girl is so independent. When she sets her mind to something, she does it. She's just so different from Shae. Shae has always been happier with someone else doing things for him, Belén prefers to figure things out on her own. I was shocked when she started cutting paper a few months ago. Every kid really is so different.
If there's something on the bookshelf she wants, she'll get it. If there are toes that need to be painted, she'll pain them...
Speaking of ways they are different, she is always singing and dancing. She asks me to twirl her while we dance to music and she is always trying to sing along. Because she can't articulate the words very well, it's mostly her making sounds, but always to the tune which is SO CUTE. She knows more songs than I realize. The other day I started singing "I See the Light" from Tangled and she was totally singing along! It was THE cutest thing! Oh man, this is probably my favorite thing about her right now. It's just so fun.
For awhile there she would walk around the house singing, "Shae shae, go away..." and then hum the rest of the tune, "Come again another day."
Potty training. We started the potty training process back in February. I wouldn't exactly say she's trained yet, more that we are, but we're getting there...maybe?...yes. Yes, we are. She occasionally tells us when she has to go, but mostly we just take her every few hours. She actually holds it for a long time, like from when she wakes up until lunch and then from after her nap until dinner (we've been experimenting to stretch the times we take her out to give her a chance to tell us, but she doesn't! She just holds it until we take her or until it's been too long and she just can't anymore--accident).
Just in the past few weeks she's gotten really angry when we take her potty. She yells no and smacks me in the face and then jumps right off the potty as soon as I put her down. It's great. Some might say, "She's just not ready yet," but we're not going back now, it'll click someday, right? Right!?
Overall, she really does well peeing, but we have the same issue that we had with Shae that pooping is the real struggle. She just stores it up until she she has a diaper on at nap time and then goes then. She has gone a few times in the past few weeks in the potty so we're hopeful that things are looking up. Ooohhhh potty training. Such a treat.
Checking out her new Elsa undies.
She has THE hardest time when we leave for Shae's swim lessons, because she isn't in her bathing suit and yells "Me, simming!" all the way to the Y. Poor girl. I usually leave her in the childcare, but a few weeks back I chose to bring her with us so that we could have some mommy and B bonding time. I brought books and everything. All she did the entire time was jump off the bleachers, pull her shirt up, and run towards the pool where Shae's class was taking place. I haven't tried again since.
We do try and go to open swim as a family every so often, so she does get her chance to go "simming" too, and she eats it up.
Anytime she sees me in the kitchen, she immediately runs over to the dining room, grabs a chair and drags it in so that she can cook with me. It's so cute how much she loves being in their with me (until there is water and flour everywhere and sponges in my cookie dough and the silverware drawer is completely reorganized). It really just cracks me up how quickly it all happens as soon as she sees me in there, "Cook, cook, cook cook, me," while pulling a chair in.
Monkey see monkey do. Please tell me that a child's desire to copy parents cleaning lasts forever. Wait, it doesn't? Nnnoooo!!!!
We had quite a bit of snow this winter and she was constantly eating it. As soon as we got outside she'd grab herself a handful and start chomping on it. I had to watch her closely because she would pick up the brown and yellow snow just as quickly as she would the white stuff.
One day I grabbed some snow off the balcony for them to play with in the tub. Belén barely played with it. She mostly ate it.
"Thanks mom, for the bath tub treat."
Eating with her is always an adventure. Crushing crackers, ripping up cheese into tiny pieces, throwing tomatoes across the table. Mostly just saying she wants "foo! foo! foo!" (food) until we actually sit her down to eat and then she doesn't want anything to do with it.
The below pictures are from a Joy School class where we played with shaving cream. It was really fun, and really messy, which kind of sums up my life with her right now.
We love watching her little imagination go to work. Besides pretending to be characters in movies/songs/books, she has recently started using her surroundings as her imagination playground. Lately, the kitchen has been a choo choo train or a school bus.
She would live outside on the balcony if I let her. She's so content to be out there with some chalk or a bucket of water and a paint brush. She always tries to bring tommy (Thomas the Tank Engine) inside with her and I always say no (it's so dirty and filled with water).
She has always been our perfect little sleeper, but just over the past few months she's had some rough patches (thank you molars and climbing out of the pack n' play--we have now moved her naps to her crib where she has yet to climb out). Naps were rough for a 2 week period. The only way I could get her to sleep was holding/rocking her and often I could never get her in to the crib without her waking up and letting out blood-curdling screams again. While it was definitely frustrating at times, I also had some pretty precious moments holding her while she slept on me. Thankfully, this little stint is over and she usually takes a solid 1.5 hour nap during the day.
She has become more particular with bedtime routines. Right now it consists of doing "tuck tuck" with her blankie, not just to her, but to baby and Tabby too, and singing a line of "How Far I'll Go" from Moana and then a line of "Let it Go" from Frozen. It only takes two minutes so I really don't mind at all. I can't get enough of her yelling out "Elda!" or "O-ana!" in a frantic plea to get me to stay longer if I forget. Today as I was leaving she yelled out "Jee-us Ky-st!" (Jesus Christ) which I assumed meant she wanted a church song, sure enough, she did. She knows how to work me.
We also went through a little week period where she would wake up at about 5:30 a.m. and we couldn't get her to lay down in her bed again, but she would happily come fall back to sleep in our bed...which usually resulted in me having half of a toddler's body on me while I tried to fall back asleep. Again, while sweet to get some extra snuggles with this one, I'm glad that little stint has ended as well.
She generally sleeps these days from a little after 8 p.m. (we put her down at 8 and she usually talks/sings or yells at Shae for a few minutes before letting the sleep take over) until somewhere between 7 and 8 a.m.
Belén is opinionated and stubborn. When she sets her mind to something, she gets VERY upset when it doesn't happen (like when she wanted to feed her graham crackers to the geese in the middle of the pond on a 50 degree day and didn't understand why I wouldn't let her run straight in to the water to feed them--she was NOT happy about that one).
She scrunches up her nose and says, "No!" to me about 50 times a day.
She bites, she hits, and she yells.
She is also very sweet and funny. We love watching her goofy side develop (like when we say, "What does the duck say?" and she says "Mmmmoooooooo" and then laughs at herself like she just made the greatest joke known to man).
I love how she lets me cuddle her in the rocking chair or standing by her crib before her nap. I love how she brings me book after book after book to read until I tell her no more. I love how she grabs my hand on Sunday morning after we get dressed so that we can both go look at ourselves in the mirror together and twirl. I love how she "sings" along with me (this started back at Christmas with the Gloria part of Angels We Have Heard On High and is now just one of the many songs in her repertoire).
I just love love love this sweet and spicy girl of ours...and all those beautiful red curls!
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