Emelia at 2.5 years

It’s only been two months since the last update, but I wanted to make sure I did a 2.5 year update.

Stats

Clothing size: 3T, size 6 shoes, size 5 diapers

Height and weight: No idea how tall, but she’s 27 lbs

Teeth: One more 2-year molar needs to come in, but she’s popping her third.

Eating

This girl scarfed three helpings of meatloaf the other day, yet won’t eat a hamburger, and won’t eat taco meat. So that pretty much sums up Emelia’s eating life. She loves carbs but will scoff at certain things at certain times. She will happily eat her bun off her hamburger one day and then refuse to touch a dinner roll the next.

The things she consistently eats are fruits, noodles, spaghetti and meatballs, BBQ meatballs, smoothies (stuffed with spinach), cheese, mac n cheese (“Mac cheese!” is consistently shouted with joy every time we ask what she wants for lunch), granola bars, PB & Js, and bagels.

She just moved to sitting on a cushion instead of her booster for meals, which is nice because we can bring back the matching dining room chair for it. Downside is she can freely get down. Which she has been approx 15 times per meal. If we set her picture timer on my phone though, she will happily watch it count down, and may even take some more bites of food before she is allowed to get down.

She’s a totally different eater than Olivia was and is. Still, we’re trying to roll with it even if literally the only vegetable she eats is the spinach in her smoothie that she has no idea is in there.

With her being at daycare four days a week, she’s still only nursing 2-3 times a day and does really well not nursing right before bed. She continues to be obsessed with my boobs, but three-fourths of the time she’s pretty good about letting me distract her.

Sleep

Sleep is * dare I say it? * going well. 99% of the time she’s sleeping all night which is amazing. She goes down at about 7:00 and wakes up between 6:30 and 7:00 every day. Rarely, rarely, does she fall asleep nursing for naps or bedtime. Which I’m not going to lie, I wish she did more of.

She’s taken to sleep with not only Dumbo (who is very clearly her lovie) but also her monkey (when not at daycare for naps and bedtime. Her monkey is her stuffed animal she sleeps with there), her little pillow that was passed down from Olivia, her muslin blanket, and then depending on the day, her glowworm, her bear from Olivia, and a variety of babies.

We started including her for bedtime prayers and she listens when I say her prayer, usually repeating Amen at the end.

Dear God, 
Thank you for loving me
Thank you for my friends and my family
Please bless Mommy and Daddy
And Toby and Sister
Please forgive me for my sins
The end

Diapering/Potty

No real progress yet. I’m planning on still doing potty training this summer, but for now, she sits on the potty when she wants, but really doesn’t do much.

Health

In the middle of March, Emelia developed a very low-grade fever. Like 99.5 F but since the threshold is 99.4 for daycare, she needed to stay home. A few days later she developed a runny nose and still continued the low-grade fever. Six days after she initially ran the fever I took her to the doctor after she was saying her ears were hurting and SURPRISE! double ear infection. Luckily, she did good with the antibiotics but had some diarrhea around that time.

Language

Emelia’s continuing to say a lot more 2 and 3 word sentences, and recently it’s been more 3-word sentences than anything. She’s just talking more and more, but there are quite a few times she is harder to understand. Her babbling now is pretty minimal.

It’s adorable because she is very good at using “I” and “me” appropriately. In fact, we just had a visit two days ago and her speech therapist joined at the appointment to listen to Emelia talk and said she’s age-appropriate at this time, which is pretty amazing.

Because she had trouble with her Ns, nurse would be “urse!” but that started changing to “nurse.” Strangely enough, she’s switched up and instead of saying “Nurse!” when she wants me, it’s “Achoo!” As in, ah-chew. It took a bit, but her therapist and I eventually thought maybe she was saying, “Want you.”

Then one day, I said, “Nurse,” when she wanted to nurse and she repeated, “Nurse.” Adn then I said, “Nursing,” and she repeated, “Nurting!” And we’re off to the races.

She was singing to herself while nursing one evening. I know they sing Wheels on the Bus quite often at daycare and she loves singing it with us.

She’ll say, “I love you,” and it melts me completely. She also said “Mama, can I help you?” when I was doing the dishes. She’s also getting so good at naming the objects in her picture books.

One time when I was reading her an alphabet book, she exclaimed, “Mama’s a pig!” No idea why, but it was cute.

Since she’s in love with Frozen 2, she loves to say, “Sitty Olaf!” (Silly Olaf)

On Valentine’s Day she said, “Bye daddy!” for the first time. And when Olivia sang, “ABCD!”, Emelia sang, “EFG!”

Milestones

We’re still working on dressing, but she can get her shoes, pants, socks, and jacket off by herself. She does need help putting on and taking off her shirts. But she puts on her socks and shoes by herself, and needs some help getting her pants over her butt.

But her shoes, yeah, she’s a rockstar at that. For the last update, I posted we had bought her some bigger shoes to practice with and she does great, though frequently, we pick her up from daycare and she has her shoes on the wrong feet.

She recently discovered a love of jumping, as in hopping, and will happily shout, “I jumping!” She’s also very good at carrying out more complex instructions, like “Take your flosser and bring it to the garbage and come back here!” Yellow also seems to be the word of the week as everything is yellow. Everything.

She also does a really good job at taking care of her babies, feeding them, bringing them on walks in the stroller, wrapping them in a blanket and putting them to bed.

Favorites

Toys: Her babies, Olivia’s toys, her stuffed animals, balls
Books: Her seek and find Halloween book, the Sesame Street book with a million flaps just like Olivia loved, Where is Baby’s Belly Button?, and The Oops Book.
TV shows/Movies: Doc McStuffins, Encanto, Frozen II, Daniel Tiger
Activities: Running around, playing with Olivia, nursing, greeting people at the door, throwing balls, going to the library, going to Target

Little Sister

These two are playing more and more with each other. They periodically see each other during the school day and Olivia said they always run to each other and hug. Emelia loves sitting right next to her sister on the couch to watch TV, especially if it’s coupled with snacks.