McDaniel Family Journal

Well, Christmas was a blast for you this year. You got a two-seater wagon, a tricycle, a ton of cars and books, and many other little items from all over the family.  Cars are your passion right now. You can play with your little cars for an hour and not move on to anything else. You get 4 or 5 of them, line them up in a perfect row, then proceed to drive each one around for a while on whatever surface your own and then park it in it’s original slot and take the next one.

Daddy has also got you making “mmmm” noises when you drive them and you lift them real high in the air to make them jump over things. You are so cute. Many people have commented on how focused you are when you are playing with them. Apparently not a lot of 19 month olds can pay attention to one activity for over an hour 🙂 What can I say…you are something special 🙂

Earlier this month you were scheduled to have tubes put in your ears to help alleviate your ear infections, however after much discussion and research in the procedure and your history, your Daddy and I decided that we would postpone it. I took you to the doctor on the 3rd and she said that your ears were all clear. Since I’m not convinced that your 3 months of infections wasn’t just one infection that wouldn’t clear up, and you had had a cold after Christmas and didn’t get an ear infection, I spoke with the specialist and he agreed that it would be best to postpone rather than give you a surgery you don’t need.

Back to adorable things that you do…
Since I didn’t journal at all for about 4 months, I feel like I still need to catch you up on all of the cute and brilliant things that you do 🙂 One of the adorable things you do is when I or Daddy come home or ask you to come to us. You look at us with this big grin and stand there just looking at us. Then you take a couple of very slow, tiny steps towards us, then all of the sudden you run fullspeed into our arms.

Another thing you do is jump. You love to jump! You started trying about 3 months ago, and back then all you did was squat down real low then come up to standing real fast. Your feet never left the ground, but it was so cute! Now you can really jump. You don’t get that high off the ground, but you do get some air 😉 Just yesterday we were bouncing this little ball back and forth on the patio and you would like jump-skip along behind it. It was like you were trying to imitate the bounces of the ball.

Negotiation is something that you’ve learned in the past few months as well. Whenever you bring a book to me or your Daddy, we’ll say “I’ll read this if you give me a kiss”. At first, your Daddy was the one that did it, and you would get very frustrated because you didn’t want to give him a kiss, but you didn’t understand that you had to to get the book read to you 😉 Now you get it! We don’t make you give us one, but most of the time that we say it you oblige… you really love your books! 😉

You started going to Day Care full-time last week, and even though you are exhausted and ready to come home, you did very well. We try to pick you up at around 4:15 or so, so that we can get you home and get dinner for you by 5:15/5:30, so we think that is probably helping.  Since you are also in the older class now too (18mo – 24 mo), you’re new teachers just can’t find enough good things to say about you. Kaleigh is your teacher again, but you have two new ones that just love you to pieces. Again, they say that you are one of the sweetest and smartest kids in the class and that they would love to have whole room of you.

When I went to pick you up the other day, you had the whole class following you around and giggling. It was obvious that you were the leader and they were imitating everything that you were doing.  From what the teachers say, that is very common. Apparently you run the show at home and at school. You are definitely not a follower 😉 

Oh, you have been talking a lot more too in these past couple of months! You can say: Hot, Cold, make the sound of a bird talking (cheep-cheep), meow, and lots of other things. Last night we were playing on the floor (I’m always your personal play gym:) ) and since Daddy wasn’t in the room with us, we starting bellowing “Da-da” at the top of our lungs until he came in there. It was so funny to see you toss your little head back and yell out for your Daddy to come play with us.

You love going for walks with Thomas still as well. Now we load you two up in your wagon for a couple of trips around the block, and the first thing you always do is get him to laugh. You start laughing when you see him and then shake your head from side to side and he starts giggling. You love it. You’ll do anything to make people laugh. Are you going to be the class clown? 🙂 

You and Thomas also have a blast at the playground on the weekends now, too. Just this past weekend you both went down the big slide by yourselves for the very first time.  I was so proud of you!  You also love to swing with Mommy on the big swing. You sit on my laugh and giggle the entire time. You love to watch my feet as I kick off and when they drag the ground as we swing back you laugh even harder. I swear that laugh of yours is the sweetest thing I’ve ever heard. You are so precious!

Filed under: What Brighton is up to now on January 14th, 2008