Stuff to Remember

This post may end up being long (and boring for most) with picture overload, but there's so many little things that I want to be sure not to forget about Palmer.  She's such a funny and stubborn little goof and has such a unique personality.  I just love her so much.

She usually does a pretty good job of not making too much of a mess when she feeds herself, but this time she had yogurt all over her face and up and down her arms.  She was pretty proud of herself.

At 22 months Palmer:
*is the WORST eater imaginable.  I think that this girl does not feel hunger.  Some nights when I put her to bed I feel like she's eaten about three bites of snacks and nothing else.  She is getting pretty good at feeding herself and she loves the independence that she feels with that, so sometimes she'll eat quite a bit when she's given full freedom to do it herself, but sometimes that isn't even enough to get her to eat.  Luckily she loves milk, so she gets some calories and fat from that.  The doctor told me to give her Ovaltine for the vitamins, and she LOVES that.  I switch it up between Ovaltine and Carnation Instant Breakfast mix.  One day she started calling her sippy of chocolate milk "tuppy" and it has stuck.  So any time she wants her chocolate milk she asks for tuppy now.  It's pretty dang cute.  She also usually loves yogurt.  Greek yogurt is a staple of her diet.  One time a few months ago when I was feeding her yogurt I was saying that it was nummy and ever since then she asks for "nummy" when she wants yogurt, so that's what we call it now.

*is an EMOTIONAL girl!  She can go back and forth between goofy happy and throwing herself on the floor sad and then back again before you realize what is going on.  She is obviously an only child and is used to getting her way all the time.  I am trying to keep her from being a crazy spoiled thing, but between her strong personality and the fact that she doesn't have any siblings it is hard to tell her no.

*is a medium sleeper.  She usually wakes up once or twice in the night and fusses a bit.  Some of the time she settles herself back to sleep pretty easily, and other times it's just easier for me to go in and make sure she's ok.  I never take her out of her crib; it's literally a 10 second ordeal to just make sure she has her binky and is not laying on top of any of her cuddly toys.  She goes back to sleep right away and life is good again.  She never sleeps as long in the morning as she needs, which is frustrating.  She wakes up around 7:00 and is very tired and emotional all morning long.  For about two weeks she slept until 8 or 8:30 and she was a whole different person.  It was so nice!  But that ended as abruptly as it began and now she is back to not enough sleep.  She goes to bed super early, anywhere between 6:30-7:30; we've tried putting her to bed later and even earlier to see if it helped, but around 7:00 seems to be her magic time.  She also has a hard time napping as long as she needs.  She usually naps about an hour and a half and wakes up grumpy and emotional.  If she naps over two hours it makes all the difference in the world.  Shortly after my last post she decided she was a one nap a day kinda girl.  Every once in a great while when she is really tired in the morning she will request a morning nap and those days are such a breath of fresh air.  She will NEVER go for it if it is my idea for her to take a morning nap, but the one or two times a month that she asks for it I am happy to oblige.  She is a very light sleeper and any sound in the universe wakes her up.  If she wakes up at all during a nap, there is absolutely no going back to sleep.  **UPDATE - I started this post a couple of weeks ago (don't judge, I'm slow) and now she is getting up between 6:00 and 6:30 every day...awesome.  BUT she has actually been a little less emotional and tantrumy the last week or so, so I'm ok with less sleep as long as she can handle it emotionally.

This was my day on May 23rd.  The top picture shows what my living room looked like by 9 a.m. even though we woke up to a clean house.  Some days I feel like it's her goal to take out every single one of her toys and spread them throughout the house as much as possible.  Today she hasn't taken out a single toy.  The bottom picture shows what she did all day - cry and tantrum.  She got up way too early and napped way too short.  Today she got up even earlier (5:48) so we're in for a good one I'm sure.

*will not go to sleep unless she has her Cosmo pillow pet, owl pillow, two lovies, stuffed Elmo, stuffed Lion, and of course her blankie so she can rub her fingers on the tags.  She always tries to get us to let her take books and her milk to bed, but that's where we draw the line.

*LOVES cookies and treats!  She asks for cookies and treats all day long.  She's definitely my child when it comes to junk food, especially chocolate :)

*talks all day long.  She is getting really good at telling me what she wants or what is wrong.  She says funny things already and I absolutely love her little voice.  She is turning out to be quite the polite little thing.  She says, "thank you" and "you're welcome" (sounds like "a welcome") and "please" ("peez") a thousand times a day.

*thinks she owns mine and Taylor's phones.  She can navigate herself all through the phones and the apps.  She loves to watch her shows on my phone.  Her favorite shows are Mickey Mouse Clubhouse, Little Einsteins and Sesame Street.  She also LOVES to take pictures and video of herself.  And she loves to flip through and look at the pictures and watch the videos over and over.  If I was as cute as her I'd want to look at myself all day long too.

Here's a very small sampling of some of the pictures she's taken of herself.  They almost always end up as pics of her forehead.

*wants to be outside all day long.  I really really want to put in some grass this year, but we are having a major drought and we don't want to get sod laid just to find out that the city is going to implement water restrictions and have our expensive new grass die.  Taylor keeps promising me that we're going to get a sprinkler system put in soon and after that we plan to fence in our backyard.  So then I can at least let Palmer go out and play in the dirt.  We're very lucky to be next door to my parents and my sister so that we can go play in their yards a lot!

*has the weirdest obsessions.  #1 weird obsession is with ceiling fans.  She's not mesmerized by them like tiny little babies are, she just LOVES them!  She can't handle being in a room that contains a ceiling fan and it not being on.  She gets SO excited when she can turn a fan on and points out every fan in every place that we ever go.  She loves our fan in our living room so much that she has a hard time leaving it when we go somewhere.  She used to cry and reach for it and say, "fan fan fan" over and over when we had to leave.  Now she just blows kisses to the fan and tells it goodbye.  Today she went as far as saying, "Bye bye fan.  Miss you.  Love you."  Cutest and weirdest thing ever. She is also obsessed with my mom's turtle.  When she walks in my mom's house she immediately starts asking for the turtle and wants to be able to see it at all times.  She used to have a really hard time leaving my parents' house because she couldn't handle leaving the turtle, but she has eased up a little bit on her turtle love recently.  She used to be very scared of the turtle.  I think she would still freak out if she had to touch him, but she LOVES to look at him!  Speaking of that, she is afraid of funny stuff.  My parents have a squishy little toy lizard thing that FREAKS Palmer out!  She starts breathing heavy and does whatever she can to get far away from that thing.  She used to have the same reaction to the turtle and to a toy turtle that my mom has.  She got over those, but she still gets freaked out when she sees a little turtle bath toy of hers and won't let me put it in her bath with her.  She HATES vacuums and has the same heavy breathing freak out whenever she can see a vacuum.  It doesn't even have to be turned on, but oh man if you do turn it on she may as well be being chased by a big scary animal.

When you tell Palmer to smile for a picture you never know what you will get.  But it's usually something awesome like this face.  How can something slightly evil-looking like this still be so sweet and cute?

*is further away from potty training than she was three months ago.  Three or four months ago she was getting really good at telling me when she was about to poop, and sometimes told me when she was peeing, so I started pulling her pants and diaper off quickly and putting her on her potty.  She actually did poop in her little potty twice and in the big potty once and peed in her little one once, but none of those times was smooth and easy.  She always kind of fought it and climbed off the potty multiple times before anything happened.  Each time seemed a little more traumatic than the last for her.  And after a couple of weeks of trying she just stopped telling me altogether when she was doing her business; and now if I ever ask her if she wants to go on the potty she automatically tells me no.  So we've taken a little break from the potty training thing.  I mean, she's not even two yet so it's fine, but she had me excited there for a bit; I really thought she might be a super early potty trainer.

*has the oddest little bedtime trick she has to play each night.  So Taylor and I put her to bed together as long as we're both home.  We read scriptures with her, say a prayer and then sing a couple of primary songs while she cuddles on my lap with her sippy of milk.  So then when Taylor kisses her goodnight and goes to leave the room she always says, "milk" and hands her milk to him.  But then as he's walking out the door she yells, "milk" again and makes him bring it back to her.  On the nights when Taylor cuddles her and I leave she sends the milk with me and makes me bring it back to her.  She laughs like it's hilarious every night.  She started doing that at least a couple of months ago and without fail does it every night. 

*has 12 teeth right now (I think...there may be more that I haven't discovered yet).  She's got her four front teeth on top and bottom and four molars.

*her middle toe is the longest.  She has the cutest little feet and toes I've ever seen (even though they're ALWAYS dirty and sweaty and stinky), but I always notice that her third toe is the longest and I think it's weird.

*her eyes stayed blue, but they're a little darker of a blue than when she was a baby.  I'm not sure what color of hair she's going to end up with.  It's always been kind of a dirty blonde, so maybe it will lighten or darken up, or maybe it will stay dirty.  Her hair has a little bit of curl, but not enough to really hold the curl all day long.  By the end of the day it's always kind of scraggly but luckily she pulls off the scraggly look very well :)

Putting Desitin on her baby after changing her diaper

*is starting to know her colors.  She still gets them wrong as often as she gets them right.  But quite often she knows blue, purple, pink, yellow, green and black.  She also knows the difference between one and two...sort of.  She knows that one is one and I think she thinks that two is anything more than one.

This girl loves baths and bubbles!

This day she took a red crayon to her bedroom door and the cream colored glider chair in her room.  This is a picture of her "helping" me to wipe it off the door.  You can't see the red in the picture, but it was there.  It came off the door easily.  The chair took some serious work to get clean.  EVERY time she colors she ends up coloring something she shouldn't...the couch, the coffee table, a non-coloring book, the dishwasher etc.

Crazy morning hair!

Cute Mason and Palmer at our Easter picnic.  Don't mind my finger in the bottom corner.

Palmer and her best buddy, Bryir.  They were so cute this day with Palmer pushing Bry in the doll stroller.  Palmer LOVES Bryir and Cheyna.  She would go live with them gladly if I would let her.  On the days that she is going to play at Bryir's or Bryir is coming to play at our house I can't tell Palmer until right when it's time or she sits there and begs for "Bya" and Cheyna nonstop until it's time.

Palmer loves dirt.  We went to the Bluff cemetery to try to clean up the grave-sites of some of our ancestors and Palmer literally just rubbed dirt all over her face.  It didn't help that the wind was blowing like crazy, but most of this dirt was her own doing.

My cute little gardening helper.

How cute is she with Kristi's glasses?

I just love this picture.  This is a classic Palmer smile, with her little nose scrunched up.  I think she looks so much like her cousin Lexi in this picture.

She discovered Robin's Egg candy at Easter and loved them!