21 months!!

This past month, Samara:

- is becoming very independent. She refuses to be fed and MUST do it herself. She is sitting at the table now in a booster instead of in her high chair. Although she likes to independent at some things, she likes to hold hands going down the stairs. I regularly hear her shouting, "HAND, HAND, HAND!" at me from the top of the stairs.

- is still quite the neat freak. She doesn't really "play" with blocks/bath toys/etc...she dumps them and then immediately starts putting them back. A friend of ours calls her Molly Maid. Very fitting. No clue whatsoever where she got that anal OCD behavior from.

- has made no progress whatsoever on the potty. She asks to go on the "pobby" after the fact. We regularly ask her if she needs to sit on the potty and we get a loud and clear "NOPE!"...but I'm not concerned. While it would be nice to only change diapers for 1 bum in this family, she'll do it when she's good and ready (hopefully before she's 5!).

- has developed some specific fears. Up until last month, she was pretty fearless. I would have been hard pressed to name one thing she was afraid of. Now, if she sees animals on TV, she whines and asks to be held. Examples: bees in the Winnie the Pooh counting DVD, baby jaguar in Dora, bears in Your Baby Can Read DVD.

- has really grasped the idea of "friends". She gets excited if I tell her we're going to see certain people and sometimes even asks for them. Today I even watched her give her friend Rylee a hug with no prompting from anyone.

Favorite things this past month:

- still with the dance parties. We used to do them once in the evening. Now they're regularly occurring throughout the day.

- shopping for DVDs. She grabs her shopping cart and goes to the cupboard where we keep the DVDs, sorts through them to grab the ones she wants (The Little Mermaid, Cat in the Hat and Jimi Hendrix are always in the mix), puts them in her cart and pushes them around the house.

- helping. I mistakenly pushed a kitchen chair up to the counter one day so she could help me make cookies. Now she is ALWAYS pushing a chair to "help". Even when I specifically do not want any help.

Things I never want to forget:

- how proud she is that she can say her name properly...SAMMY!! (I still miss when she called herself Mammy though)

- if Presley is crying, Samara runs over to her, strokes her hair and says, "it's oooookay, it's ooookay".

- when we pull into the driveway, she sees where we are and says, "HOME".

- how during a dance party if "(Today I Met) The Boy I'm Going To Marry comes on, she grabs her bear and slow dances with him. It's enough to make me cry picturing her dancing with her future husband like that.