Oh Baby! (Almost 19 months!)

Hello! Mommy still hasn't made my photo slide show of my 18 month pictures so I thought I'd give you another sneak preview. She'd better hurry up as I turn 19 months on Wednesday!

Alex and I had a pillow fight one day. I think I won! He didn't actually seem to mind and continued with his nap!

This week was all about babies! One of Mommy's friends from college adopted a baby recently so we brought them dinner this week. At first I wasn't so sure about the baby, but after a few minutes I wanted to hold him. Mommy said he was too little and fragile for me to hold.

So I admired him from afar. He was really tiny and reminded me of my baby dolls. I liked him a lot!

That same day we went to the park after dinner. Guess who was there? My buddies Logan and Nolan! It wasn't a coincidence as our mommies planned this outing. Now that Logan is smiling a lot when you make funny faces at him, I think he's really cool!

This is me tickling Logan's foot! I love to tickle!

Nolan is more fun to play with than Logan though. We had fun swinging away! When we are in swings our Mommies do a better job of getting us both in the picture as we were contained! When we're on the loose it's a lot harder!

Mommy and I did A LOT of baking this week! Mommy got two gigantic zucchini from her friend from college. From one zucchini we made two chocolate zucchini cakes and two loaves of zucchini bread. We also made cupcakes, caramel corn, and peanut butter cereal mix for our weekend trip (I'll tell you more about that later!) Daddy's work really liked all our baking as they were the recipient of a lot of our treats! I mostly helped by taking out all the pot holders and wearing them around the house. We still have more zucchini so we are going to make blueberry zucchini bread and a zucchini au gratin casserole this week.

One of my favorite things to do lately is look at photo albums and play a game where I have to find whoever you say i.e. Where's Grandpa? Where's Austen? Where's Uncle Steve? I'm actually very good at this game. As you can see in this picture, I will interrupt what you are doing to insist on playing it. I don't really care that much about folding laundry and as you can also see, Alex doesn't either! He'd rather just be in the laundry basket.

This weekend we took a REALLY fun trip to Eau Claire, Wisconsin! We went with Mommy and Daddy's friends and had a little baby shower for Tiff and Mike. They live in Madison now so meeting in Eau Claire was kind of halfway (The Twin Cities crew recognizes that it was much closer for them than the Madison crew....but there really isn't anywhere interesting to go at the actual halfway point!) The best part of our hotel was the water park! This is me when I first went in the water. I was perplexed a bit at first but it didn't take long for me to start really having fun!

This is me about 2 seconds later! I loved all the water fountains and things to splash and the waterfalls! It was awesome!! Plus I got to debut my new swimming suit. My other one was getting a bit tight, and Mommy had wanted to buy me this one last year but they didn't have it in my size. The best part? It was on clearance for 6 bucks!

This is Daddy and me in the little kid area of the water park. Daddy was allowed to play there even though he is a grown up.

Here is our family portrait, water park style!

Daddy and I dominated in water basketball. Look at the air I get!

They had this fun snake to ride on. These pictures turned out funny due to the lighting and the fact that Mommy had to zoom in since the snake was attached to the bottom of the pool and we couldn't get any closer. If you ask me what a snake says, I say , "Hissssssssssssss!"

After a long time in the water, we had to get out to get ready for dinner. It was a bummer but I was getting pretty pruney by that point!

We ate dinner at Texas Roadhouse. I was especially fond of the yummy bread. I actually ate dinner before we got to the restaurant since dinner was pretty late for me. So the bread was kind of like dessert! I was very good and sat in my high chair the whole time. Mommy and Daddy were relieved at my good behavior because, well let's face it, my mealtime antics have been wearing on my parents lately. I'm mostly well behaved and somewhat easy going most of the time...but when it comes to meal times I get a little testy. I'm just trying to exert some independence and power here! Lately I don't want to sit in my high chair, or my booster seat and want to just sit in a regular chair. My parents don't mind this as long as I sit, but usually a few minutes into it, then I want to stand up on my chair and horse around. Then I get banished to a chair with straps and lots of tears follow. My newest thing is being very particular about how I eat something. Some days I will eat things in bowls. Other days I only want food on my tray. Lately I have preferred eating off a big person plate...mainly Mommy's plate and get really upset when she just tries to take something off her plate and put it on mine. I would rather just eat right off her plate, but she doesn't like this as I spill most of it by the time the fork goes from her plate to my mouth. I also think I should be using adult utensils and not the toddler ones which is ok for awhile until I start horsing around with them and stab myself with forks. Let's just say that meal times are pretty touchy and you never know what is going to happen. Some meals are totally uneventful and I will just eat nicely, and others end in everyone being mad and cranky.

After we got back from dinner it was time for jammies and story time. Nolan and I did story time together with our dads. Then we had a slumber party!!!! When Mommy made the reservation for our suite it said it was 2 bedrooms, plus a "gathering area". So Mommy, Daddy and me were going to have 1 room, and Logan, Nolan and their parents were going to have another. When we got to the room we saw that only 1 bedroom had a door..and that the 2nd bedroom was not separated from the "gathering area" by a door. After lots of contemplating about how we would work the sleeping arrangements since us kids go to bed a lot earlier than the adults, we just put all of the kids in the closed off bedroom, and hope that we all went to sleep and stayed asleep. We were all so tuckered out from the water park that we went to sleep nicely and slept until 7 a.m. When we woke up we realized that Nolan's parents had snuck in and slept with us! So there were 5 of us in the bedroom, and Mommy and Daddy slept in the rest of the giant suite. They thought it was funny but it was the only way that it would work!

Our room was called, "The Las Vegas Suite" and was decorated accordingly. It even had a slot machine! I liked pushing the buttons a lot. Daddy put a quarter in and won 10 cents off a Dairy Queen purchase in the water park. We never got DQ (bummer!) so the tickets went to waste. Daddy said it really wasn't much of a prize!

This is Logan and me at breakfast this morning. I was too interested in all the action to actually eat anything. I'm not a continental breakfast kind of girl I guess! By the time lunch rolled around I was really hungry! Mommy has a new rule that if I refuse to eat breakfast, then I don't get to have any snacks until lunch. She's hoping I figure out soon that I should just eat some breakfast and not be so hungry and cranky. We went to Daddy's favorite quick service restaurant, Fazolis. Before I was born, there was a Fazolis by our old house. Then one day my parents drove by and were sad to see it was shut down. Then it turned into a Caribou Coffee. Anyway, now there aren't any Fazolis in Minnesota, so every time we go to Eau Claire we have to eat at Fazolis. Last year when we went I wasn't eating anything but purees and milk so I didn't get to try it. I was so excited that I ate things that I never eat like lasagna and spaghetti! It appears that I might be over my "I-don't-eat-anything-with-a-tomato-based-sauce" phase!

But rewind to this morning again, after everyone (but me) ate breakfast, we went back to the water park again! It was just as much fun as the first time! I really really really liked going down the water slides. Mommy and Daddy were getting really tired of taking me down them. I wasn't quite big enough to do it myself. There is a fun video of me on the slide at the end of the blog!

When you are traveling with kids there is no such thing as "traveling light!" We got this luggage cart to bring all of the stuff to the cars. Nolan and I thought the cart made a good ride! Nolan and I had our first conversation in English and not toddler babble. He would say, "Want me to push?" and I would say, "Yes!" He also says my name really cute. He say MeGAN with an emphasis on the last syllable. It's sweet!

After all that excitement I needed to just take a breather and watch some cartoons with Daddy while Mommy got ready. I love hotels because there are always so many pillows!

What else is new with me?

• I'm gaining more and more words! I can now say "baby" really clearly. I just started that today. I used to kind of say "bay ye" but now it's clearly "bay be" Other favorites this week are "off" "help" "ball" "bath" and "bye bye"
• In one of my more cranky times this week I said, "No Mom!" I almost never say the word no so Mommy was pretty shocked when I said it!

Catch you all next week!