Monaloca

More Tahoe photos to share, plus what Melina’s up to at 21 months. She’s lost all semblance of a baby and seems to have entered the two’s a few months early!

Our girl still LOVES animals. Her favorite books are the ones featuring animals, especially cats and dogs. (Though she’s also suddenly a big fan of Elmo and Maisy, in books and videos, and adores the book “Goodnight Gorilla.”) She’s by far the biggest fan of Thor in our household. She sometimes picks out her own clothes and especially likes a T-shirt with birdies. She’s asked me not to button the top buttons of her coat so she can look down and see the birds.

The other day Melina pee’d in her potty for the first time, just before bath. It feels like a fluke. Joey and I both remember the first time Kai used the very same potty around the very same age. We clapped and got super excited… only to be faced with another year and a half before a truly potty-trained Kai emerged.

She’s now extremely proficient with stairs, as evidenced by her ability to navigate them, over and over and over again and just for fun along with her cousins, at the cabin in Tahoe. She’s also developed a knack for picking up the tiniest piece of anything (a crumb on her placemat, one of Thor’s hairs on the couch) and handing it to me.

Every now and then Meli will spontaneously count to 10 (more or less) when stacking blocks. If I happen to say “seven” (as in, “It’s almost seven!”) she’ll say “eight, nine.” Colors aren’t quite there yet. When we ask her “What color is this?” she nearly always says “blue.”

At a friend’s house the other day Melina had her hands wrist-deep in a big bowl of birdseed meant to sprinkle on peanut butter-coated pine cones. She suddenly stopped playing with the seeds to look at me, a huge grin across her face, and say “appy.” I wasn’t sure I’d heard her correctly so asked again, then said “Are you happy?” She widened her smile even more and said, “Yeah. Appy.”

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