Kaylee at 19 Months

It's early Saturday morning, and as I wait for the coffee to finish brewing before I get cracking on grading for school, I thought I would take a moment to post a few pictures and stories about Kaylee from the past month.

-Kaylee has taken to running...around the loop that connects our kitchen, dining, and living room. She'll say, "Run, run" and take off, wanting to be chased. When buying our house, one of Mark's must-haves was a layout that had the living room, dining room, and kitchen all connected (kind of like a circle) so that we would be able to play around it. At the time, I was like, "Um, sure...that sounds good." But now I am reaping the full fun factor of being able to run laps in the house...and Kaylee has definitely gotten me to run a few laps this past month. That counts as exercise, right?

-We were playing upstairs, and all of the sudden, from behind a closed door, I hear, "Are-you?" a few times...It took me a second to figure out she was trying to get a game of hide-and-seek going...and asking me, "Where are you?" in her sweet little baby voice. 

-Kaylee loves to poke her food with a fork and if she's slowing down at mealtime, all we need to do is pull out the fork and she'll keep on going. Dipping is another fun strategy to keep her eating...

-She's getting really good at saying thank you after receiving something and had quite the opportunity to practice on Halloween when we went trick-or-treating. (Not that she really understood what we were doing or why, but it sure made our neighbors smile to hear her saying, "Thank-oo")

-Kaylee has a shoe fetish, and we've known about this since she was about a year old, but the other day, as Grandma was getting ready to leave, she walked over to my mom's shoes and said, "Grandma. Shoe." She proceeded to pick it up and try it on, but I was blown away that she knew whose shoe it was!

-We see Grandma R several times a week and Kaylee just lights up with joy at the mention of her name or when she arrives at our house. I recently realized that we don't get very many pictures of the girls with Grandma, so I'm trying to be better about having the camera at the ready when she's over.

 With her little brother due to arrive in a little over three months, and how hectic the school year has been, I'm not sure how many more of these updates I will be doing for Kaylee. Of course, I will still post updates on the blog, but a year and a half (plus a little) seems like a natural point for the monthly updates to stop, especially since we only refer to her age in months every once and a while. It is still hard to believe that she's been in our lives a year and a half, and we sure can't imagine our family without her!

OK, time to get to work. This was supposed to be a quick update, but I guess I had a lot of stories to share! I've had a couple cups of coffee at this point and I will be stressed later if I don't get something done before the girls and Mark wake up!