Notice that Julia’s mouth is imitating how she is imagining the Mama eating the food off the spoon. I love it!

(27 months) The girls are always finding new things to play and making new favorite games. Julia has been exploring the dollhouse in the last week in new ways. At Christmas when we got the dollhouse she was more interested in dropping pieces down the stairwell or inspecting each piece.

This last week she has become very interested in playing with the dolls and the furniture. One game she plays is to go to her play kitchen and “fix” a bowl of food and then take it to the dollhouse. She takes turns feeding the different dolls with a big spoon. It was hilarious!

Our dollhouse family has grandparents, parents, a son, a daughter, a baby, and two “best friend” dolls. When Julia plays with the family members she sings a little happy song and occasionally interrupts the song with a doll making a comment to another doll like “night-night”. Once the interruption is gone the song resumes immediately. Her favorite dolls to play with are the kids. Emily rarely plays with the baby, but Julia does all of the time. Occasionally other toys work their way into the dollhouse. One day I noticed that a small Elmo doll was riding the rocking horse and playing in the pack-n-play with the baby.

Our Valentine’s Day was a beautiful, sunny and breezy day. It was still cool enough that you wanted to be in the sun, but warm enough you wanted to be outside! For all the snow and cold we had this winter, an early spring was really wonderful to enjoy. We spent the morning at the Knoxville Botanical Garden in our special “Secret Garden”. The kids drank up the sun and loved moving around.

Little Julia has been struggling these last couple of days. The inner Julia is trying to come out and she hasn’t figured out how to do that.

Yesterday, we had a lot of crying over everything. The details do not matter, but she cried if you said “Yes” or “No” to the same request. After a while and a little Mommy comfort, it seemed to pass and she was ok. Today, we had a rash of misunderstandings. Julia would hear something and interpret it. Then she was devistated when she realized that it wasn’t happening. For instance, Emily was playing pretend shower and Julia thought she was going to take a bath. She was in hysterics when she did not get a bath.

I guess the hardest part of watching Julia figure all of this out is watching her not be able to communicate what she is thinking. I wonder what she is going to discover as she blossoms through this next stage.

Congratulations to Miss Julia for figuring out how to climb up by herself in one of the indoor playgrounds we play at! I told Julia I would be there in a minute to help her past the two tricky steps and the next thing I knew Emily was announcing that Julia had done it all by herself. We did a happy dance and had a lot of excitement from all parties. She had been close, but just couldn’t figure how to lock her knee and push off. Maybe climbing out of bed has given her the confidence to try it again.

Today was the day that Julia discovered she could climb out of her crib. She has climbed out of the pack-n-play for a couple of days now, and she must have decided that the crib was possible too. This morning, Mommy heard several unusual noises coming from the girls’ bedroom and decided to wait and see what happened. Sure enough, in a few minutes a little person was opening the door with a grin across her face. Emily and Mommy praised her accomplishment and we took her back in to re-create the accomplishment. Julia was pleased to show off her new skill which she was still perfecting.

After Julia’s nap she gets some milk to enjoy. She was hanging with Mommy for her milk. She decided she needed to bring all of her friends and have them cuddle with her while she enjoyed her milk. I love these sweet moments.