Cecily: 18 months!

Our little girl is 18 months old! 

She is quite the character. She talks all the time and can say about 50 words consistently and says sentences. My favorite one lately: when Jonathan isn't here she says "I wanna see my dadda". And her new favorite word is "baby". She HAS to point out any baby that we see. I'm hoping she'll still be excited when we have a new baby in the house in a few months. 

She loves:

dancing 

Party Rock Anthem

singing songs 

Itsy Bitsy Spider
Popcorn Popping
and doing the hand motions to both

mooching food off of whoever she can

saying prayers 

eating

her cousin, Shelby

swings and slides

frozen peas

necklaces

ice

bananas

Elmo

shoes

cats

babies

her panda

being outside

washing her hands

She doesn't love:

naptime

most meat

 not getting her way

clips or headbands in her hair

diaper changes

 She is very stingy with her cuddling and kisses, but when she's in the right mood, she's very sweet.

She's transitioned to her toddler bed really well, and spends at least an hour every morning playing quietly in her room after she wakes up. It's awesome, because I get to sleep in and I have been exhausted this pregnancy! 

She's been going on the potty a couple of times a day for months now, and is getting better at telling us when she needs to go. I'm kind of just following her lead on the whole thing, and it seems to be working out ok. Eventually, I'll have to get more serious about it. But, I think she'll be fine when the time comes.

Here's her messy face after picking (eating) blackberries at my parents' house. She LOVED it.

We absolutely love this little girl!

Our House: The outside.

In honor of this month being the one year anniversary of us buying our house, I'm going to do a few before and after posts about it.

We made a list of things that we had to have, and things that we'd like to have in a house and went out with our realtor like a million times before we found this house.

Must-haves:
under $60k
3 bedrooms
2 bathrooms

Not too dilapidated

 Would-like-to-haves:
Big tree to put a swing in
Driveway wide enough for 2 cars
Big kitchen
Extra room in the garage for Jonathan to have a workshop

Our house has all of those, except for the tree for the swing. And, it was way under our budget, which is pretty awesome! And it has the coolest front door I've ever seen!

We bought our house on the cheap and have put a LOT of work into it. We're super proud of how awesome it's becoming. :)

The outside of the house is pretty much the same as it was a year ago. Once we get around to it, we're going to paint it something other than that weird yellow-beige color. We have added a couple of garden beds, but the plants in them are still very tiny. And we bought a flowering cherry tree to put in the front yard once it gets a little bigger. 

And here's now. Jonathan and his uncle replaced the ugly, broken sliding door with some pretty french doors. We just need to frame them out now...

And my uncle helped us frame out the back windows. It's hard to tell in that first picture, but before, there was just that expanding foam stuff and it was pretty yucky. Now, it's lovely! :)

There's still a lot more work to be done on the outside, because we've been mostly focused on the inside, which I'll write about later, once I actually take "after" pictures...