Mandy has gone through a couple of big milestones in the last few weeks. She’s 100% out of diapers (woo! it’s like getting a pay raise!) AND we’ve moved her to the big girl bed. And by “moved her to the big girl bed” I mean “took the gate off her crib and put it in the basement.” She did really well, and we’ve only been woken once by a muffled “thump!” followed by cried of “I fell out of the bed!”
It didn’t take any time at all, though, for Mandy to realize that with the crib gate gone, she could simply swing her legs out and exit the bed any time she wished. It took her another couple of nights after this to realize that if she avoided us, she stay up to prowl the house longer. You can guess where this led. One night when Geralyn was out with some friends I had put Mandy down and retired to the basement to watch TV. When Ger came home late that night she found Mandy asleep in her little pink arm chair after trying to waiting up for mommy to come home. Sweet, right? The next night I got wise and came upstairs to investigate strange sounds, only to find Mandy sitting at the kitchen table with a cookie in one hand and a soggy clump of orange snack crackers in the other. She looked up at me in surprise, paused for a second to think, then said through a mouth full of Cheese-its, “I just wanted a hug from you, daddy.” We even have a little latch high up on the pantry door, but she had pulled a chair over and ascended to the necessary heights to unhinge it and procure her snack. Are two year olds supposed to do this kind of thing?
You may also notice some pictures of the kids playing in the leaves. These are real leaves, imported at great personal expense from my front yard. The funniest thing was actually afterwards when Sam put one of those tall paper lawn bags over her head and started running into things while shouting “I’m a ghost! I’m a blind ghost!” Alas, I didn’t have my camera handy. Sam continues to like going to kindergarten, and apparently she’s got a few areas that she’s excelling in. The other day we got a message from the school informing us that Sam had displayed high level understanding of a story, including its message, themes, and morals. This was pretty cool, because I’m pretty sure the only phone calls my parents got from my schools were the ones saying that they had just beaten me with a plastic paddle for not doing my math homework. True story!
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