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| Don't worry—her lip is black because she is a thief and managed to sneak some licks from her birthday cupcake when we weren't looking (she will do this with any baked good you leave within her reach) |
Hollie had a birthday and now she is two. She is energetic, lively, curious, stubborn, clever, and silly. She still loves lions and the moon. She still loves books, though she tires quickly of frequently read titles, and I think there will be many more library trips from here on out. She loves singing songs, and knows many church songs and
Yo Gabba Gabba songs by heart. She also knows "Home on the Range," the song my father always used to sing to me when I was a wee baboo.
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| Riding her bike with two of her "best friends" |
Her "best friends" (as she calls them) always come in pairs, and she picks a new pair each morning. Frequent "best friends" include Grover Mouth (as opposed to Fluffy Grover and Mama Grover—Fluffy Grover has extra curly hair, Mama Grover is my old Grover doll, and Grover Mouth has an exceptionally wide open mouth and he is Hollie's favorite), Big Bunny (the stuffed rabbit formerly known as "Whiskers" from my childhood), and Hopkins (a Signing Time stuffed frog from my Cousin Erin). Recently inducted into the "best friends" circle is her new stuffed Muno doll, who has been a constant best friend since Hollie's birthday on Wednesday.
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| Going on a walk with her superhero cape. |
Holls loves to count (we heard her counting to eleven over and over this morning until Dave got out of bed and let her out of her room, and she surprised us tonight by counting backwards from eight while we were getting her birthday cupcakes ready) and she loves to recite the alphabet (which she commonly calls the "now-I-know-my-ABCs-won't-you-sing-with-me song").
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| She also loves making funny faces and funny noises. |
She loves the Japanese anime
Totoro and we let her watch it about once every two weeks or so. She calls the little totoros "bunny balls" and every time it reaches the part where the family is taking a bath in the dark, she freaks out for some unknown reason and runs out of the room until we skip the DVD ahead to the next scene. It is weird and oddly endearing? And a little sad because Dave and I both fantasize about having a Japanese-style bath in our house someday, but maybe Holls is deathly afraid of them? We don't know?
Hollie ranges between "picky" and "adventurous" eater and I can really only describe her as "unpredictable." If you ask her what she wants for dinner, she will always say pizza. We had Papa John's for her birthday, and I sort of felt like a slacker mom. Sort of. She also loves bacon, pickles, and chips (even though we have bought potato chips maybe once ever since she's been born and it was on the fourth of July). But she also loves avocados, "straw-babies" (as she calls them), apples, bananas, grapes, noodles (any kind), red peppers, yellow peppers, white peppers (onions), rice, salsa, mashed potatoes (if she can eat them on her fingers), and fish sticks (if she can dip them in "cat-syrup," or ketchup). She'll eat Indian curry and Mexican food but she won't eat hamburgers. Like I said, "unpredictable."
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| She likes broccoli 2 out of every 5 times she considers it. |
Hollie loves to laugh and dance and jump and slide and shout. She can jump high. She will run and slide on her knees across our wooden floors for hours at a time. She practices pushing herself around on her new tricycle all day long. I've never seen such athletic stock in a kid before, and I am completely alien to the attribute. As soon as she is old enough, I'm sending her off to ballet class and soccer camp so somebody who actually has coordination will help her hone these talents! I literally stress out sometimes that the only person she ever has to dance with is my sorry self who still thinks the Cabbage Patch is advanced choreography! (Fortunately David is quite a bit more suave and sportsy than I am.)
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| Jumping! |
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| Sliding! |
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| Running! |
Holls sometimes get into trouble, and she has her very own time-out chair (a green fold-up chair we keep behind her bookshelf). When she knows she has done something wrong, she will ask, "I'm going to time out?" When she received Muno on her birthday, she was feeding him milk and some of it spilled on the floor. She held Muno over the small puddle and said, "Muno, do you see what you did? Let's clean it up?" So I suppose she is "getting" it.
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| She's also a lounger. She can lounge on anything. |
We had a whole birthday party planned for her this morning: finger painting and cupcakes (homemade pumpkin cupcakes and snickerdoodle cupcakes, our Grover family specialty) with all her little kid friends. Yesterday she came down with a 102-degree fever, so we had to cancel everything at the last minute, tragically. She didn't mind. But I'm still a little sad. (We're planning to reschedule in a couple of weeks and just call it a finger-painting and cupcake-eating party.) So since we didn't have cake on her birthday, we bought three mediocre grocery store cupcakes and celebrated over them. Hollie picked out her ghost cupcake by herself (but we all three ended up eating from all three).
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| The morning Hollie was sick, she fell asleep sitting up. I didn't know what a mom should do in this scenario, so I just propped up a pillow next to her and put a blanket on her. |
Our little girl is a sweetheart and we love her like crazy. She still tends to prefer David, but I don't mind. I wouldn't change a thing. Happy Birthday, you old Hollie-wallie-doodah. You old Babaloo. You crazy old coot. We can't wait to see what you become this year.
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| Coloring with Dad. |
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| Feeding Grover Mouth (just like her mom used to feed her Grover doll) |
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| Wearing Mom's socks and slippers (a favorite pastime) |
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| Sleeping in her "purple backpack" |
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| She gets jealous when I take pictures of Charlie on the Boppy, so sometimes we follow up Charlie's monthly photo-op with some of his big sister in the same pose. |
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| And sometimes we end up taking pictures of Hollie's "best friends," too. |
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| Holls, you are an imp and a clown and we love you! |
Here's a quick video of the birthday song for our family who want to see it!
