Making dinner

This past week Sara Beth made dinner for her and Heather.  She went to her play kitchen, and prepared some plates of play food to eat.  She then went to get Heather. Heather was led back to the play room to eat "dinner" with her.  Heather was so proud of her, she had to take a picture.

Sara Beth made the final touches to her meal and then asked Heather to sit down with her to eat it.

The mere fact that it is summer outside won't slow Sara Beth down from putting on her winter clothes.  She opened the dresser drawer on her own, and dressed herself.  Heather suggested to her that perhaps it might be a little warm for the hat and scarf and leg warmers, but Sara Beth would have none of that talk and wanted to go outside anyways.

Don't let the sleepy look fool you; Sara Beth's morning has slowly shifted from 8:15 to 7:15.  For a while she was wanting to get up for the day at 6:30am, but we were going to have none of that.  In the mornings, before she fully wakes up, she will snuggle up with you, so I do enjoy relaxing with her on Saturday mornings.   Before long, inevitably, she will fully wake up, and begin to run around for the day.

Sara Beth is facinated by loud noises.  Last week, an ambulance with its siren on passed Heather's car, and Sara Beth has mentioned it every day since then.  Earlier, I mentioned the hot Texas summer around her, but, fortunately, we have had rain this week, so it has cooled off and has been rather pleasant. With the rain storms comes all the thunder and lightning.  Sara Beth will always mention the thunder when you talk about the rain with her.

While it was raining, we have gone outside to play.  I showed Sara Beth the drain pipe and explained how the "intsey weensey spider" climbed up a water spout just like that one.  When I sang the nursery rhyme, Sara Beth did the hand motions.

I did it

Sara Beth's lingual skills have developed to the point that she will now routinely use short sentences.  Her favorite is "I did it!"  She will repeat that whenever she accomplishes any size task.  When she puts some trash in the trashcan, she will say it.  When she climbs into her chair for dinner, she will say it.  If she gets her doll stroller stuck in a tight spot somewhere in the house, she will say "Help! Help!" and then when she frees the stroller on her own three seconds later, she will exclaim "I did it!"

Spring has definitely sprung around here.  The afternoon temperature consistently flirts with triple digits.  But, on the bright side, it gives us a perfect reason to eat popsicles outside.  Sara Beth loves the treat, but will end up consuming about half of it after it has dripped onto her arm or arm.

Sara Beth enjoys her indoor bounce house as she can do all sorts of physical exercise and Heather and I don't have to be concerned about heatstroke.  Once she starts to slow down from the exertion, she will sometimes lay down in the middle of the bounce house.  If Heather or I try to lay down next to her, she will loudly proclaim "Wake up!"  I'm just glad that we still keep a gate infront of her bedroom door so that she is not able to come into the master bedroom at 5 in the morning to say that same thing.  I think it is only cute when the sun is shining outside.

My parents are coming down more regularly to check on the house that they are building.  When they come down, Sara Beth has a great time playing with them.  In this picture, she took Grandpa's hat, ran around the living room with it, and then climbed back on the couch to put it back where she almost exactly where she found it.

Heather plans our dinner's a week in advance so that she knows what she needs to purchase from the grocery story.  She uses a pen and paper to make the plans and a dinner list at the same time.  Sara Beth likes to color using the same pen and paper.  When Sara Beth saw the pen and paper in Heather's hands, she sweetly climbed up next to Heather, snuggled her for about 5 seconds, and then made a lunge for the pen.

I have introduced Sara Beth to video games. I think that I will introduce them to her in the order that they were released, since the early ones were the easiest to figure out.  I fired up the original Nintendo that we have and showed it to Sara Beth.  In, Mario Brothers, she likes the pause button as that makes the coolest noise, but her favorite game is duck hunt.  She can't actually hit anything, but she likes the bright flash when she pulls the trigger and loves the ducks and dog that show up on the screen.

Tea and Necklaces

Not that it is a surprise to anyone, but Sara Beth loves jewelry, just like her mother.  Lately, she has her favorite bead necklace.  We don't want her snapping it and choking on a bead while she sleeps at night, so she doesn't have it then.  But most mornings, she begins her mornings by asking for the necklace, and then keeps it on until she goes down for her nap, and the process repeats after her nap until bead time.  She is really good about giving it up, though.  We ask her and she will voluntarily remove the necklace and hand it to us though she does it with the saddest eyes.  You can see the pink beads in a couple of the below pictures.

Sara Beth loves tea.  She will ask for a sip from Heather's cup... 

And whenever she gets that sip, she will then ask to have the whole rest of the cup for herself.

Tea cups are not the only thing that Sara Beth wants to share.  After declaring herself all done with her dinner, she got out of her seat and then went over to sit in Heather's lap.  She then wanted to take Heather's knife for her own purposes.  Heather didn't give it to her, but Sara Beth kept reaching for it, stopping only to smile for the camera.  Sara Beth didn't have the beads in this picture because we just got back from the pool and sat right down for dinner so she didn't have time to adorn herself.

While Sara Beth loves her necklaces, bracelets, bows, purses, and dolls, she also enjoys playing with matchbox cars.  She has several that somehow turn up in her toy collection, but she will then take the car and drive it around the house producing the sounds of a revving engine and squealing tires.

Jump

Well, Memorial day weekend has rolled around, and ToysRUs celebrates the holiday by putting stuff on sale.  So, we bought Sara Beth's birthday present a little early.  Ok, a lot early.  And we put it up right when we got home instead of waiting until her actual birthday.  Since that point, Sara Beth has had a lot of exercise jumping in her new bounce house.  With every leap, she says "Jump".  So, while cooking in the kitchen, I can hear "Jump .. jump ... jump ... jump" from the other room.  

Occasionally, when our cars are sitting in the garage, we let Sara Beth sit in the front seat.  She loves turning the wheel, pushing all the buttons, and making engine noises.  Our neighbor bought a new truck, and when Sara Beth and I were sitting in the back seat in his driveway, she climbed out of my lap, over the front arm rest, and into my neighbor's lap and began to play with the wheel.  And now, whenever we go to any store, she will continually ask for the "car cart."  Some stores have carts with a steering wheel for the kids to turn, and if Sara Beth had it her way, all stores would have those carts.

All kinds of fruit are now in season, which means all varieties get to be a part of dinner.  Sara Beth, of course, wants to use the cherry pitter herself.  She knows that her mom is more likely to let her play with metallic tools at the dinner table, so she slides up into Heather's to fulfill her cherry pitting desires.

Sara Beth has actually gotten to be rather helpful when it comes to putting up dishes from the dishwasher.  She knows to which cabinet each item goes.  The only two issues are:m1) she cannot reach half the cabinets on her own, and 2) she can get distracted playing with all the cool stuff in the cabinets.

In what we will call the before-bounce-house era, BBH, Sara Beth enjoyed playing with the cushions on the couches.  Or, to be more exact, she enjoyed playing in the structures that Heather and I built from the couch cushions and blankets.  She would come up to us and ask for her "house," which is what she called the mounds.  Now, she wants us to drape the blankets over her new bounce house, and doesn't care for the couch cushions anymore.