Happy Birthday Sarah!

Wednesday my baby girl turned 2.  When is a child no longer a baby? I keep extending the date by adding new benchmarks she has to reach.  Walking? Nope. Talking? Nope. 1 year old? Nope. 2 years old? How about when she's potty-trained? Good, she's still a baby for a little while. Relief.

We started off her special day by having breakfast in the special Birthday Bowl.

Then we went to the mall with Kenzie and her kids, Malea and Isaac.  They played in the playplace and then we got pretzels.  That's what you get when your birthday is on a stormy day.

During her 40 minute nap (grrr) I managed to finish her cake.  Pretty cool huh?  The frosting was delicious.  I bought it from Macey's bakery.

Justin brought home balloons for her.  That would have been enough presents for her.  She had to hold them while she folded her arms for the prayer and has barely let go of them since. She cried that night when I wouldn't let her take them to bed. Notice the cool red Birthday Plate.

 Super excited to open presents.

She was pretty much a spaz all day.  It must have been all the treats.

 She caught onto opening presents pretty quick considering it had been since last Christmas that she opened one.  Maybe I'll post the video.  Basically she stopped looking at was in the bags and just moved onto the next.

I love this sequence of pictures.

She got kind of nervous when we started singing.

But she knew just what to do.

The next morning we played with her new toys for a couple of hours.  She is all about cooking and feeding her stuffed animals.  She says "more salt?" dumps more in, tastes it then says "more salt?"  She gets that from Justin. 

She even put on her apron. Victory!

I came into the room and saw this.  I told you she's obsessed with her balloons.

I took some pictures of her today in her new dress at my parents' house with their awesome new camera.  It's way too complicated for me to figure out all the settings but I think we did pretty good on the auto-setting.  And it helps to have a gorgeous little girl to photograph. I took 167 pictures (yikes).  Here are of my favorites.

Okay, here's a bunch more since she's so dang cute.

Farewell to a chair

I put Sarah's highchair away today. She would rather sit at the table now. But I'm kind of sad about it. She's sat in that thing every day since she was 4 months old. Here's a few of my favorite highchair moments.  And since she's turning 2 next week, this will be a nice review of how dang cute she's been all these years.

"Sarah loud? Daddy loud? Mom loud?"

This is Sarah's favorite game.  She picks a person from Column A and says that they are something or has something from Column B.  The possibilities are endless.  She can go on for hours and hours. And the game just keeps growing in length as she learns more people's names and new words.  In fact, when she learns a new word, she has to run it though everyone she knows.

Column A                                                        Column B
Sarah                                                                 Right back
Dad                                                                   Silly

Mom                                                                 Nice

Nana                                                                  Shirt

Papa                                                                  Loud

Maga (Grandma)                                                Messy
Baka   (Grandpa)                                               Stinky
Nate                                                                   Arm
Braden                                                               At work
Dallin                                                                  At school
Zack                                                                   B-bye
Tyler                                                                   Scary
Indy (Justin's aunt's dog that she met once)          Heavy
Dosie (Josie Blume)                                             Stuck

She's into fake sneezing because she likes it when I say bless you.  And she never misses saying "bessoo" when others sneeze.

I like this picture because she looks like a lion cub.  A lazy lion cub.

I don't remember which video she's saying what.  Since I do a lot for her, I don't feel guilty making her say things for my amusement.  My favorites right now are "noodle" and "little".  But I don't want to make her say it too much or she'll get better at it and then it will be boring.

And Meeoh is the wandering neighborhood cat.  She calls for it whenever we are in the backyard and will follow it anywhere.

And it's been almost a month since she's seen her Grandma Nadine (Nana) but she talks about her every day. So Nadine, one of these is for you.

And I love how she counts. We've taught her ready, set, go but I think I like 9, 6, 9 better.

Sarah's favorite toy for a few days was this old paint can.  She wanted to take it everywhere, even in the car.  I threw it away when she was asleep.

I cut Sarah's sandwich into "fingers" just like my mom used to.  I had to laugh at how Sarah nibbled at it.

Sarah really wanted to eat her breakfast while sitting in her rocking chair. This is the set-up she came up with. She ate all her oatmeal.

Watching the rain yesterday afternoon.

Well, I better get back to preparing my RS lesson. I've only taught primary so I'm not sure how to end a lesson without coloring and candy.....