17 months

McKinley is almost a year and a half old! At 17 months, McKinley is more full of energy and life than ever and is constantly making us laugh and smile!

She loves to climb on EVERYTHING! Unfortunately, her new love for climbing has led to a few new bumps and bruises along the way. She is very adventurous, has no fear and is a tough little bugger! She is in her element when she's climbing and exploring!

Some of McKinley's favorite places to go are to the park to play, the child watch at the YMCA, story time at the library, and The Children's Museum! She loves to play and be around other kids!

Now that she's a little older and able to play a little more she loves going to the Children's Museum. She loves playing with all of the fun toys in the toddler room, carrying around the puppies at the vet's office, playing in the water at the water tables, and playing in the grocery store pushing around the shopping cart and picking up food.

One day, in the grocery store area, McKinley was pushing around the shopping cart and I was helping her pick out food to put in it. I'd put some food in the cart and she'd immediately throw it out. She put a sausage link in her cart and kept it in there. She started to put more and more sausage links in her cart. If I put anyother type of food in her cart she'd throw it away. I guess she only wanted to buy sausage that day! Me and a couple with their daughter in the grocery store area were cracking up at her little personality!

But, McKinley's favorite place to be is with her cousins Mya and Madison! She gets so excited when she see's them and start to squeal a high-pitched squeal (I think she got this from Mya, because that's what Mya does when she sees McKinley too). When she sees Madison she goes up to her and says, "Hi" over and over. She loves to give them both hugs and says, "Aww..." while she's hugging them. Her and Mya like to play together and enjoy being around each other. It's fun to have cousins who live so close and that we get to see regularly for them to be such great friends!

She is such a sweetheart and likes to snuggle with me every once in a while! I love my snuggles and take full advantage of them when I get them! When we sing the "I love you" song from Barney, she goes around giving everyone in the room a hug and saying, "Aww.." while she's hugging us.

McKinley is finally getting some hair in, but it isn't coming in evenly all around her head! It's long over her ears and getting long in the back, but still short on top! So to try and fix it, I put it in pig tails over her ears (since that's where most of her hair is). I think it turned out quite cute, and is a solution to making her crazy, growing her look presentable.

As McKinley becomes more of a toddler, she is becoming a pickier eater! Luckily her favorites foods are fruits, so at least she likes to eat healthy when she does want to eat! Her favorite fruits to eat are bananas, apples, oranges and strawberries! Something she's being doing at her high chair lately is throwing her food off on to the floor. When we see her about to throw the food on to the floor we say no and shake our heads at her. So now she'll hold the food off of her high chair about to drop her food on to the floor and shake her head no, but still drop it anyway!! Little stinker!

One more funny store about McKinley is about her blue sailboat pacifier pictured above! At my baby shower, my friend thought I was having a boy, so she made me some super-cute boy themed pacifier clips complete with boy pacifiers to go with them :) Over the last 17 months, every other pacifier we've given McKinley has been lost! Even the pacifiers that are newer have been lost along the way, but this sailboat pacifier has been there since day one, and it's the only one that we've held on to! All her cute girly one are long gone!! Probably about 5 or 6 times I've left the pacifier somewhere, or it's been lost in the house or the car, but without fail someone finds it for me or it magically shows up! So we joke about her boy sailboat pacifier that can't be lost!

Lastly, here is a picture of my sweet family out bowling on family date night :)

16 months!

My baby girl is 16 months old now!! As we like to call her she is our little toddler! And a toddler she definitely is! Complete with a new found independence, climbing on everything, throwing tantrums when things don't go her way, and learning new things and new words everyday! She's like a little sponge, it's so amazing the things she picks up on!!

At 16 months old, McKinley is becoming quite the talker! The words she can say are mama (for me and travis), ba (bite), nana (banana), wawa (water), mah (barney), book, ball, ma (more), duck, fish, cheese, gramma (grandma), grapa (grandpa), snow, tree, shoe, baba (the love bug and blankey she sleeps with at night), mah (her cousins mya and madison), bye, hi, milk, juice, woah, uh-oh (she says this when she drops something, sometimes she says it before she drops something and she thinks its quite funny). I'm sure there's more but this is all I can think of now! It seems like she learns a new word everyday! Today's word was snow, since we finally got some more snow and it's been quite cold here in Nebraska!

McKinley is quite the sweet heart! She loves to snuggle with me, which I love! She also loves to blow kisses! Whenever I tell her to say bye, she starts blowing kisses! Above is a picture of her doing this! She is still obsessed with Barney and she loves the "I Love You" song. If we ever sing it she'll go around and give everyone a hug and even a kiss if you're lucky. She'll kiss you right on the lips and make a smacking noise as she does it! It's quite cute! She'll also give her babies or stuffed animals kisses the same way if you ask her to!

She loves to climb in and out of things. She loves boxes for that reason! For Christmas, we should've just gotten her a bunch of boxes! She also loves to put things in boxes and take them out one at a time!

For Christmas, she got a shopping cart that she loves to push around and fill up and empty with the play food we got her to put inside it! She also is a great helper at cleaning up her mess when it's time. I start singing the "Clean Up" song and she starts to put all of the food back in her cart or all of her toys back in her toy box. She's such a good helper!

She loves to play games, like her momma :) Some of her favorite games to play are "where's McKinley" (that's what she's playing in the picture above), "I'm gonna get you" where I chase her around and tickle her, "where's your nose" in which she points to her nose then to the person whoever is asking's nose, and "what does a .... say?", in which she responds with the appropriate noise for the animal we just said. Her repertoire includes: sheep-baa, cow-moo, horse-neigh, puppy-woof, kitty-meow, fish-"kissy face", lion/bear/tiger-rawr, elephant-"blowing noise", monkey- "ee, ee", snake- "sss" and duck-quack. Her favorite noise to make is a rawr noise and makes it quite frequently! It's so cute!

Her recent development is that she has become quite the climber! She climbs on and off of the couches all day. She loves climbing on tables and climbing on the bed. The next thing that I'm not looking forward to is learning to climb out of her crib! Hopefully it'll take her a little while to learn this!

She also is still getting into EVERYTHING! Now even more so that she's getting taller and can climb! There's only a few places in our apartment we can put things so she won't get a hold of them! It's right in the center of a table or the back of a counter! She's got quite the reach on her!

She loves all things electronic! She can navigate her way around on my ipad and iphone! She also loves to pretend like she's talking on the phone. She'll say "Hi" and then babble and at the end say "bye" while she has the phone up to her ear. But, if she ever has a real person on the phone she freezes up, gets silent and just smiles!

Here she is at the library at her favorite station, the computers! I can hardly keep her off of them when we're at the library! I think we have a computer whiz in our future! She still loves to read books! She loves to sit and look at books and especially loves to have me or Travis read books to her. It's amazing how she memorizes what is in the books we read her. In an animal noises book we read her, she memorized what animal noise came next. And we've been reading her a book about Grandpa and today I caught her flipping through the book saying "grapa"! She always impresses me with her quickness!

She also thinks its so funny when she coughs and smiles the whole time. When she's done coughing, she fakes coughs because likes it so much. If she ever hears someone else cough, she starts fake coughing too!

To end with, here's a cute picture of McKinley in her new winter coat since it's winter around here!

Christmas!!

In the beginning of December we had a week of winter weather, complete with plenty of snow and freezing temperatures! It helped us to get into the Christmas spirit and for it to really start to feel like Christmas around here (too bad it didn't stick around for the actual week of Christmas)!

To get in the Christmas spirit, we took McKinley to visit Santa at the mall! She didn't even cry when he held her, she just kept a close eye on me to make sure I wasn't going to leave her with this strange guy with a beard. Santa told Travis that McKinley asked for a red Mazaratti for Christmas! She dreams big :)

One of my favorite things to do around Christmas time is some holiday baking! Here are McKinley and Travis enjoying the remnants of my baking adventures! Can you tell that McKinley enjoyed the tradition of licking the spoon :)

Here is McKinley showing off her cute Christmas shirt. Another fun thing I like to do with her around the holidays is dress her in fun holiday shirts!

On the 23rd, we headed off on the 6 hour drive to St. Louis to spend the Christmas weekend with Travis's parents and sisters! We had a great time! We went to a Handle's Messiah sing along, went shopping at a few malls around town, ate at a few fun restaurants, ate the traditional Christmas Eve dinner of fondue, Christmas breakfast of scones, opened presents, watched lots of movies, played games and enjoyed hanging out and talking with family we don't get to see very often!

We were so happy to spend a few days with Travis's sister Natalie and her family. We used to see them all the time when we lived in Utah and miss getting to see them! So it was nice to be able to spend a few days together and get to know their precious baby girl Violet a little better! McKinley still loves her Uncle Mike even though she hasn't seen him in a while.

One of my Christmas projects I was working on was making matching PJ pants for me and McKinley. Unfortunately, I ran into a few problems being the beginner sewer that I am. So I had my expert of a sewer mother-in-law help me out in finishing them when we got out to St. Louis. We just didn't get them quite done in time to wear on Christmas eve, so we took these pictures a few days later! Hopefully they'll still fit next year and we can sport them on Christmas Eve then :)