Today, the little choncho turns 3! It really is unbelievable to me that she could be this old.  We woke her up this morning, and gave her one of her presents, some butterfly wings.  She really liked them.

I’ll take a rare moment to brag about her publicly, not because I think she’s better than your kid, or because I’m an awesome parent (I’m not), but because I love her and I’m so proud of her.  She is so awesome and sweet and polite (most of the time).  Even when she’s upset, she’ll say “thanks” when you hand her something.  She’s beginning to read, can do some simple math, and loves to draw and paint (the latter can become quite messy).  She builds the greatest things out of blocks and legos.  We went to Red Robin on Sunday, and I asked her to circle the items she wanted from the kids menu.  She circled mac ‘n cheese and oranges.

Happy Birthday, Choncho!

A twist on Bill Cosby's humerous show,  the other day I said the following to my daughter:

I'm sorry, donkeys don't stick to the refrigerator.

Taken out of context, Becky thought it was pretty funny. Here's the context: I was playing with Jenna in the kitchen the other day, and she was playing with 2 plastic donkeys as well as some refrigerator magnets.  After seeing how the magnets stuck to the refrigerator, she tried to do the same with the plastic donkeys, which didn't work of course.

It's Jenna's 2nd birthday!  Wow, I can't believe it's already been 2 years.  Here's one of the pictures we took yesterday for our Christmas cards.

That was really fun.  I don't have a nice flash, so I had to resort to auxiliary lighting.  All things considered, I think they turned out pretty well.

Jenna constantly amazes me with what she knows.  She was playing with some blocks this morning and I asked her how many blocks she had.  She said, "Let's count.  One... Two... Three... Four."  Wow.

She's counted as high as 20, and can say the entire alphabet.  She loves to play with toy animals and make them talk with each other.  She loves to play "knock knock", where she'll close a door, we'll knock and she'll let us in, grab our hand and pull us in for a "visit".  Fun times.

I know, 2 picture-only posts in a row.  I couldn't resist this one though.

Starting on Halloween (a couple of days shy of 11 months), Jenna passed my criteria for walking on her own.  Becky brought her up for some of the MS-sponsored Halloween fun, and to our surprise was totally capable of walking down the halls of building 42, grabbing candy that people had placed outside their doors.  Evidently, our house was simply too cluttered with the chaos of unpacking for her to be able to demonstrate it fully there.

To add to the hilarity, she was dressed as a monkey.  I've had pictures of this for quite some time, but I haven't uploaded them to Flickr yet.  They are awesome.

So, this weekend, we purchased and installed 3 hardware-mounted baby gates to keep her from getting into too much mischief so that poor Becky doesn't have to case her around all day to keep her from getting into trouble.

This is more or less a test to see how this works.  This is not the first time she's laughed, nor the first time we've caught it on video.  It IS pretty funny though.  Enjoy.

I was watching Jenna this afternoon, and she was crawling around and generally having fun.  She crawled over to a little book (Goodnight Gorilla, to be exact), openned it up, and began making noises.  This was nothing new.  She does this often, and we think she is pretending to read it.  What I was most amazed by was that she began making sounds like E-I-E-I.  This of course is familiar.  So, I grabbed her Old MacDonald book, which was nearby, and began reading it.  Lo and behold, Everytime I read, "Old MacDonald had a farm...", she would respond with E-I-E-I-E-I.  I was completely amazed.

I took me a while to realize that I ought to be videoing it.  By the time I started rolling, she was less interested, but I did get it a few times. If I get a chance this evening, I'll get it encoded and get a clip up here.

Becky's been starting to teach lessons again.  This time in the evenings so that I can watch Jenna.  It's been difficult for me to be "on display" for her students and sometimes their parents.  So, I've been experimenting with different things to try while she's teaching.  Yesterday, Andrew was able to come by after his tennis tournament in Georgetown, so we decided to take Jenna out on the town.

We took her to Fry's first, where I loaded her up in the Baby Bjorn, and we walked the isles looking at all varieties of wonderful things.  She did very well.  In fact, she slept some.  She loves that thing.  When all else fails, I know I can settle her down in the "bjorn".  She did so well that it didn't matter that we hadn't brought the diaper bag or ANYTHING except for the bjorn.

On the way home, we swung by Pei Wei and picked up some dinner for ourselves and Becky.  Yummy.  Hopefully there will be many more trips to Frys and Pei Wei in our future.