Merry Christmas! We are looking forward to this Christmas – the joy of Emily opening gifts and hugging on Julia.

A few funny stories from Christmas Eve.

I’m not sure what is sweeter than this display of love. I had put Julia on the couch, and Emily had proceeded to climb up to play with her. Hugging and kissing is one of her favorite games to play with her sister. After hugging her she got a blanket, laid down next to Julia, and covered the two of them up with the blanket. I guess she wanted to play night-night with Julia.

We needed to move some leaves in our yard, so Emily and I spend a couple of hours outside accomplishing the task while Robby had baby duty. Emily had some toy rakes to help me with, but she liked to use Mommy’s rake. Lucky for me, she didn’t enjoy wrangling the awkward adult rake for long and went to play with other things. More leaves have fallen so I will put her to work again soon.

I decorated for Christmas in stages because of sickness in our house. One evening I brought out the fireplace decorations. Emily was very curious about the decorations and inspected each one. She was very taken with the snowman and brought her blankets over to him. She proceeded to lay down next to him to hang out. It was so funny! She talked/babbled a lot when I explained the birdhouse decoration. I wondered if she wanted to know where the bird was that was going to live in the house. The perch was her favorite part of that decoration.

I thought that it would be fun to make a list of all the words that Emily has been using. I made the list at the beginning of her 22nd month, while she has added more words since then I am going to keep the list as it was at that point. Emily has a lot to say, but a lot of it comes out as babble. Her words consist of the beginning of the word and if lucky two consonants. The back half of words, additional syllables, and ending consonants are usually dropped completely. Of the babble that Mommy can translate these are the words she is saying:

mama, da (daddy), sister, julia, hi, hey, bye-bye, night-night, eat (will also sign), thank you, please (will also sign), yes, yeah, no, on, off, up, down (will also sign), nana (banana), lid, knock-knock, pee-pee (will also sign by patting diaper), milk (will also sign), juice (will also sign), phone, teeth, hot, cold, purple, pink, kitty, doggie, k / ok, shoe, help, backpack, map

Emily loves her coat, scarf, and hat. Actually we think she loves to go outside and she wants them on so that she can go out. This day we were going out and I had to get Julia ready first and Emily was impatient. I asked her to put her coat on by herself while I got Julia ready. I watched Emily put her coat on backwards. I tried to grab the camera in time to get a photo of her attempt, but between the camera action and my giggles she had almost removed it before I could take a photo. She didn’t get it on that day, but she will do it by herself soon.