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!