Baby mama drama

Poppy has suddenly turned into a little baby mama.  All weekend she has been dragging poor little "baby" around, making sure she is fed, burped, diapered, nose is wiped, and is quiet.  It's so cute to see how nurturing she can be.

Another things she's been doing all weekend is spreading out a blanket on the floor and setting up books and toys for herself and then saying "I'm at the beach!"

.........................

So I had one of the most traumatic experiences of my life the other day.  I had off on Friday, so my mom and I took Poppy to the Burchfield Art Center.  Poppy and I have been there a bunch of times before and she's always super good about staying by my side and letting me know when she's had enough and is ready to go.  We were there about 10 minutes when we noticed this HUGE, LOOOOOOONG table filled with white handmade ceramic vases all closely arranged.  It was beautiful.  There were hundreds of vases on it, if not thousands.  Just as we were getting ready to leave the exhibit, I decided to try to take a picture of Poppy standing in front of said piece of artwork.  And as I'm playing with the settings on my camera I can hear Poppy telling my mom that she wants her to be in the picture as well and then all of a sudden, CRASH.  Poppy inadvertently touched one of the vases as she was pulling my mom's hand and the vase crashed into another vase and another and another.  DEAR GOD, I (along with ever other patron in the museum that stopped and held their breath along with me) was sure that all of the vases were going to come crashing down in a domino affect, but luckily, it stopped after 3 or 4.  And they didn't even break, they just tipped over onto each other.  And as everyone sighed a huge breath of relief, Poppy goes "Uh oh mama, big mess!!!"  I have literally been shaking for days.  Can you even imagine that happening?!?!  It was awful.  We ran around looking for a security guard, who we never did end up finding, but by the time we got to the 2nd floor and looked down onto the exhibit, we could see that it had been fixed already.  We left shortly thereafter and I don't think we'll be going back anytime soon.  Here's a picture of the exhibit from the 2nd floor.  I can't even describe how long that table is - like probably as long as the length of my house.  I'm getting a headache just thinking about the whole thing.

Just look at that face.  How could you ever be mad at that little stinker, even if she did almost ruin the biggest piece of artwork I've ever seen...

So thankful...

... for these turkeys.

After eating her 10th black olive, she declared "Poppy no like dat!"

We had such a perfect day.  I have so, so, so much to be thankful for this year.  I hope everyone else had as nice of a Thanksgiving as we did!

Let the madness known as the holiday season begin!  I feel like our lives have been crazy for the past couple of months.  No time for relaxing around the house, walks around our neighborhood, or even visits to the playground.  And from now until after Christmas it only gets crazier.  And then suddenly- ahhhhhh.  The calm after the storm.  Cannot wait.

{Poppy and Lola - bff's forever}

Oh, and before I forget - a few of Poppy's favorite things...

Everything is "nice and warm".  When we put her fleece pajamas on after a bath, she says "I'll be nice and warm?"  If she sees that somebody is about to eat something that is too hot, she says "Wait until it's nice and warm."   She tucks her collection of ratty's under her blanket and asks them "You nice and warm now?"  So cute.

Favorite book/song is "Over the River and Through the Woods".  We've been learning it at music school over the past couple of weeks and I keep finding picture books at the library that have the lyrics to the song in it, so it gets sung A LOT at our house right now.

Puzzles.  She has a big floor puzzle and a smaller princess puzzle that she puts together at least 10 times a day on our coffee table.  All about the puzzles.

Quite the fashionista, I know.

Poppy the Pip

Oh, she has been such a little pip lately!  I put her in time-out for the first time in a long time the other day.  When Marc got home from work he asked her why she went in time-out and she put both hands up in the air and said, "It happens." and walked away.  Marc and I just about peed our pants.

Chicago

This past weekend we were off to Chicago to meet up with some of our blogging buddies.  What a great trip!  Poppy was a trooper - she loved going on an airplane, riding the buses, taxis and she even got to take a horse-drawn carriage ride through the city.  I had an amazing time getting to know Michelle, Elizabeth and Christine and their families.

{She loved being in Chicago "this much"!}

Um, yeah, I could definitely live here.

Poppy playing peek-a-boo with Colin.  This was about the extent of Poppy playing with the other kids.  Apparently 3 days wasn't enough time for her to warm up to everyone... maybe next time.

{Spencer, Poppy, Olive & Colin}

We spent lots of time at the playground, the aquarium, the Navy Pier, shopping, and just hanging out getting to know one another.  Like I said before, Poppy loved getting to experience all the different modes of transportation, but when I ask her what her favorite part of the trip was, she exclaims, "PIZZA!!!".  While I did enjoy the pizza, the highlight of the trip for me was getting to know these families, whose blogs I have followed for so long.  We've all watched and supported each other as we brought our babies home and now we all finally got to meet in real life!  We had such a great time, can't wait to do it again next year!

obsessions

So I'm assuming this is typical 2 year old behavior, but this girl easily becomes OBSESSED with things.  For instance, ever since our apple picking expedition, she asks for apple pie on a daily basis.  Loves it, can't get enough of it.

A few of her other obsessions:

Stickers.  We are putting in requests for multiple reusable sticker books for Christmas.

Thomas the train.  She could play with her choo-choo's all.day.long.  And have you ever watched that show?  It's the worst ever, but she loves it.

Her rats.  It all started with a stuffed rat.  She must have "ratty" with her at all times.  Marc was stopping by Ikea on his way home from a trip a few weeks ago, so I told him to pick up another ratty as a back-up.  He gets a white rat instead of her pre-existing gray rat, and a baby rat too.  So now she has Mr. Ratty, Mrs. Ratty and baby ratty.  And she now needs all 3 of them with her at all times.  And we still have no back-up ratty.

Chicken Soup With Rice by Maurice Sendak is her fave book right now.  We read it approximately 10 times a day.  I'm pretty sure she has every word memorized.

Taking her pull-up diaper off.  This morning was the 3rd morning we found her bare little bum in bed while she was holding her wet diaper.  And apparently at my parents house today, she took off her pants and underwear during nap time and sat her bare little bum on the headboard of her bed while she was supposed to be napping.

"Daddy a boy?  Mommy, Poppy girls?"  Somehow she managed to figure out the difference between boys and girls and each morning she verifies with us that Marc is a boy and me and Poppy are girls.  And then she continues to list every other person she can remember and tells us whether they are a boy or girl.

Blue.  Apparently blue is her favorite color.  If she sees something that is blue, or might be blue, she asks, "This bloooooooo mama?"  She has no interest in learning any other colors.

And that's our obsessed girl in a nut-shell.

trick or treat!!!

[caption id="attachment_1376" align="aligncenter" width="717" caption="She kept saying she was eating apple pie."][/caption]

[caption id="attachment_1380" align="aligncenter" width="717" caption="This poor little pumpkin ended up with about 20 layers of paint on it."][/caption]

[caption id="attachment_1379" align="aligncenter" width="492" caption="She started out walking, but once she figured out that she was getting candy from each house, she started running."][/caption]

[caption id="attachment_1377" align="aligncenter" width="717" caption="Scoring her first piece of loot."][/caption]

[caption id="attachment_1378" align="aligncenter" width="717" caption="Proud of their pumpkin carving skillz."][/caption]

We had such a great time this year.  It was so fun to watch how excited Poppy was to go from house to house.  Oh, and then she loved handing out candy to all of the trick-or-treaters that came to our house.  Except if they had a scary mask on, then she would hold onto their candy and say "Poppy no like that!" while she pointed to their mask.

And apparently she didn't get the memo that she was supposed to sleep in an hour this morning for daylight savings time.  She actually decided to get up an hour earlier than usual, which technically made it 4:30am!!!  Every couple of minutes I kept hearing her say, "mommy, daddy, where are you?  Open door mommy, daddy!".  But she didn't sound upset, so I just tried to go back to sleep, hoping that she would do the same.  After an hour of hearing her call out for me, I finally decided to get up.  I opened her door to see that she had turned her light on, taken off her pull-up diaper, put her pajama pants back on, and was attempting to put her wet diaper on her baby dolls, while saying "Poppy no want that - it wet."  Nice.