Morgan is now a very independent little girl that is three going on thirteen, complete with attitude.

The other day I said, “Morgan, could you please go put on some pants?”.

She turned and said, “Maybe” long pause, “Maybe Not”.

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She has to brush her teeth by herself (we still have a turn, but she’s quite insistent that it is her job), she has had us change all the doorknobs in the house so she can more readily open them (we agreed, as this allows her easier access to the bathroom at night), and she’s quite the little helper in the kitchen (Beth and her make all sorts of wonderful creations).

She is also 100% certain about the things she likes and wants.

Grandma asked her what she wants for her birthday and she said, “cake, outside”.  When we followed up and asked what kind of cake, she said, “a kitty cat cake”.

Morgan is now counting to 3, can spot many letters of the alphabet, and knows most of the animals (and their sounds) in her books.

She can now carry on a pretty complicated conversation, but still signs many of her basic words.  I asked her to say thank you to Grandma the other day and she didn’t do it.  I said, “Morgan, how do you say thank you”.  Without skipping a beat she turned and said, “with my hands”.

Her imagination is starting to kick in big time.  Every night we sing a little song that we invent each night.  She directs me to what I’m supposed to sing about and then I try and rhyme something together (sometimes even successfully).  Lately she’s been mixing and matching all sorts of weird things and then starts laughing before I even begin, because she knows it’s just silly.

Morgan is also an engineer in training.  We have these bath ducks that have little LED’s in them that blink away when they contact water.  Her green duck ran “out of juice”.  Morgan asked me to help her open her blue duck (which I did) and then she proceeded to “get the guts” from the blue duck and put them into the green duck so that it works again.  Fricking cool!

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Charlotte is now baby running around the house.  She can say “momma” and “dadda” and we are pretty sure “bath”.

She has her sister’s infatuation with the fountain, and just loves the water.  She is [knock on wood] sleeping better but seems to be having a heck of a time with her teeth still.

She just howls when we brush her teeth, but we think that might not be a pained sound but just a “I don’t like this” sound.

Charlotte is such a loving girl.  She snuggles into all her stuffed animals and if you pick her up she’ll just curl right into your arm and neck.

She’s even started giving little kisses.  Wet kisses.  If you ask her to if you can give her a kiss she’ll swoop right in and either pucker her lips or give you the crown of her head to kiss.  You never know which one you’ll get until your lips press against soft wet lips or a your teeth break against her hard head.

And now she’s trained her sister to do the same trick.  *sigh*

Charlotte is also REALLY big into piecing things together.  She loves her toy blocks and stacks them from one tower to another.  She loves putting the blocks away into containers.  Today she was sitting in the recycling and was finding the old milk lids and placing them on the old milk containers.  That’s tough stuff to do.

And today when we did our Easter Egg Hunt, I found that any place that Charlotte had found an egg, she had gone back and placed a rock from the fountain in it’s place.   Adorable.

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We’ve been doing a ton of work around the house and the girls have been busy doing their best to destroy it.

Beth and the girls are putting in a garden this year (this will hopefully be our first year without deer).

We’ve had a good Easter this year, with the girls being mostly good almost tolerable.

Happy Easter 2012!

Here are some shots from March, my Dad’s birthday, and Easter:

She is SOOO much more confident in venturing out on her own than Morgan ever was.  She can now stand from sitting without any support and can take several steps on her own.  I think the record is about 10… !

She’s 11 months and booting it around the house.

Of course, it’s driving Beth nuts.

She is also picking up a lot of wonderful baby babble and tons of zurberts.  She also does this wonderful little lion’s roar that she does when she is especially hyper or hungry.

She also loves the trampoline the girls got for Christmas.  She has no hesitation zooming across the bouncy mat and just goes nuts if her sister or mom start bouncing hard.

It’s REALLY hard to get a picture of her.  She moves fast, she doesn’t sit still, and if we even get close to getting a good shot, her sister grabs for the camera….

We are going to look at getting a new camera soon… ya, that will solve our problem =)

The big news: Charlotte has taken her first steps!  She’s 10.5 months and starting to take those first steps away from whatever she is holding onto.

And she is just loving it!

This new found mobility combined with her tummy finally settling down has made for one happy baby =)

And she’s even started to say “da da”  – wow!

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Morgan’s speech has continued to develop and she is now able to communicate some pretty complex thoughts and ideas.  She still uses a really interesting blend of speech and sign language… but her meaning is almost always understood.

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Grandma Lehmann stopped by on Sunday with a special treat for the girls… a sled!

We took turns pulling them around the yard and the girls just loved it… With more snow on the way, I’m sure we’ll be getting our exercise.

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Beth took the girls to strong start last week, and although they had a lot of fun, they also brought back the inevitable cold.  The girls seem to have gotten over their sniffles, but mom and dad are feeling pretty hang dog.

Beth has it the hardest, as she has early morning with Charlotte and a long day of chasing two VERY active kids…queue the scowl, mom =)

We’ve been so incredibly busy with Kid Development that it’s hard to summarize all that has been happening.

Morgan hasn’t stopped growing and continues to eat as if she were a 13 year old boy.  She is skinny as a reed, but man, is she TALL (38+ inches for a 2.5 year old).  She is mostly day-time potty trained and seems to get a real pride from her skills =)  Beth made her cloth diapers with velcro snaps for her dolls and she is continually putting on their diapers, then declaring “wet bum”, taking off the diapers and then taking the dolls to the potty.

Her vocabulary has just exploded with development.  Although we’ve been eagerly awaiting this advancement, it has still taken us by surprise with how fast she is progressing.  The number of words she can say, the number of words she can combine into sentences, and the clarity of her speech is increasing daily.

Morgan has also stopped using much of her sign language.  We still have an interesting blend of spoken words and hand communication, but it is definitely leaning more towards speech every day.  She continues to teach her sister MSL (Morgan Sign Language).

Charlotte – oh boy, where to begin.  She has been crawling since mid-November, but now she is just flying down the halls.  She has mastered going up stairs and has some pretty good success on going down them.  She has also just zoomed through crawling to start cruising (9 months) and is just doing amazing.  She can reach just about anything she puts her mind to… and if she can’t reach, she gets her sister to fetch it for her.

When she is concentrating on something she can free-stand for about 10 seconds.

Charlotte is still having a lot of difficulty with her teething… which is affecting her sleep… which is affecting her mom’s sleep… which is pretty disrupting to the household.

When she gets her sleep, she is so happy and ready with smiles and the house is completely transformed… but this doesn’t happen too often =|

She has also taught her sister that if she makes this screeching noise she gets attention.  So Morgan has started screeching.  When they both get going – yikes!

We bought them a trampoline for Christmas – we have visions of sticking them out there first thing in the morning, leaving some food and water out for them, and then letting them back in the hosue sometime around bed time.  Right now Charlotte loves it but Morgan is a little reluctant to go on by herself… which is odd since she loves her cousins’ trampolines.

As the temperature increases, this should be a fun activity for them.  They now have a fenced front yard, a trampoline, and a wonderful new bubble machine from Grandma and Grandpa Lehmann.  Should be a kids dream yard!

For Christmas, we headed to Auntie Tracey’s for a wonderful get together.  Both Beth and I were pretty out of it as Charlotte hadn’t stopped screaming in about 10 months, including every second of the car ride to her house.  We were going to give her to someone to hold so that Beth could get some hands free time, but that wasn’t to be.  She just wants her mommy.  Wonderful child, but I cannot wait for these teeth to settle down.  (She has her two front bottom teeth, and about 3 on the way).  Morgan had a great time with her cousins.  They are so good with her.

And of course, the children were spoiled this year.  They got some of the nicest clothes you could imagine… and wonderful toys that they just love to share back and forth.  Charlotte is MUCH more into toys than Morgan ever was.

And the house is a mess =)   Our TV cycles through our photo library when it isn’t in use (think screensaver) and every once in a while a picture will come up that shows our house pre-children.  And Beth and I just stand there mesmerized by how clean and orderly things are.  We just sigh and stand there transfixed =)

New Years was fairly uneventful for us (bed at 10, iPod alerted me at midnight, Beth is in crash mode getting ready for her 4 am wake-up call).  Morgan had a strange melt-down but we fixed that up with a wonderful new invention: warm milk with a half spoon of hot chocolate mix…

Happy New Year to All!

Running

Noisy Toys

Riding

Charlotte has just sprouted all sorts of new abilities.  It started after Thanksgiving dinner when she decided she’d like to give crawling a try.  It took her about 2 weeks to start getting the hang of it and made really excellent progress… going from an army crawl to learning to mix in a bit of getting up on her knees, to full hands-and-knees power crawling.

But she didn’t think that was enough.  No, she decided she had best tackle the stairs.

I was checking in while on the road and at 11:30 am Beth reported she had started eying up the stairs.  At 1:30 pm she had taken a crack at them and had tons of encouragement from her big sister.  By 3:30 pm she was going up the stairs flawlessly.

Two days later she started going down them.  Now she is fully mobile in the house and just loving it!

But why stop there?… let’s explore this whole world of going vertical.  This last week she has decided to try pulling herself up.  And now Beth is greeted by a standing [crying] child at 1 in the morning (sometimes the crying is preceded by a loud thumb as she loses her balance).

She is now crawling to her destination, pulling herself up, and reaching for whatever catches her eye.

So in a month she learned to crawl, pull herself up, and is starting to cruise.  Wow!

Oh yeah, and she is now into eating solids – the more the better =)

And the difference in her personality has been stunning.  She is SOOOO much more happy now that she has mobility.  Way more smiles and giggles (and this hilarious snorting that she does when she is especially happy).  And Morgan loves showing her little sister how to do things (read: get into things she shouldn’t be getting in to).

Morgan has turned into a little kid right before our eyes.  Morgan has grown 2 inches in the last 5 months and is now in the 95th percentile for height (yikes!).  She got her first haircut and the transformation to kidhood has been amazing.  Her vocabulary is starting to really expand (and oddly, her sign language continues to increase as well) and she is so interested in everything her mom does.  She’s a little girl that loves clothes, and dress-up, and baking, and eating the baking, and playing, and running (constantly).

As we start to teach Charlotte sign language, Morgan joins in and shows her little sister her own take on how the signs are done… so we’ve started doing MSL (Morgan Sign Language).

This year we were able to enjoy Halloween (as you may recall, last year we spent it in emergency with Scarlett Fever and Strep Throat).  Morgan went as a puppy and Charlotte as a Kitty.  They were both wonderfully behaved and Morgan signed Thank You to everyone that gave her a treat.  Very sweet kids.

Morgan in her garden.

Now that Morgan is fully mobile she is into absolutely everything.   The other day she decided to open the sliding glass door screen and head on outside.

Here are a few shots of her getting into trouble in the garden.

Given how much damage she can cause when she toddles around, we’ve now started calling her MoZilla.

Here are a few pictures:

Morgan Lily Grace Lehmann Eleven Months Old

Somehow another month has slipped by!  Morgan has had some really big developments this month; probably the biggest being that she took her first steps!

**UPDATE**

Morgan just got back from a weigh-in and she is now at 21 lb’s and 7 oz and is 29.25″ long (!)

She is now wearing her 12-18 month clothes – yikes!

Here are a few pictures:

A few Firsts:

★ Walking

★ Eating seafood (loved it!)

★ Lemon

★ Play date (Brielle and Rebecca)

Here are a few pictures:

We had a absolutely wonderful family evening tonight.

Morgan and I went with Matthew to drop of a couple of computers to a customer.  Then we got a fabulous dinner at the Feastro Taco Truck in Davis Bay and went down to Roberts Creek Beach to eat.   Morgan had a feast.  She had her first taste of fish, shrimp, and lemon.  It goes without saying that she loved every bite.

After our awesome dinner we did a little bit of grocery shopping.  Daddy showed Morgan how to eat the produce before we have paid for it   We just couldn’t keep her out of the grapes.

When we got home we had another big first for Morgan.  She took her first unaided steps!!  Well, we did stand her up to get her to try to walk to Daddy, but she took the steps without holding on to anything!

We finished the evening with a nice bath (to get rid of all the leftover fish), and then off to Morgan’s room for a little bit of reading before off to bed.

All in all I think it was one of our best nights ever.