Do it again! Do it again!

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Thanks, ladies.

The ones who commented here, the ones who emailed and the ones who called. Thank you.

Y'all are what keeps me going with a smile on the days that all the magic and love and light my girls hold is just enough to keep me putting one foot in front of the other. The support and compassion is much appreciated - thank you.

There are days, however, when the girls put the smile on my face and there is *nothing* that can take it away.

In my wallowing I've neglected to post about Miss O's (very) belated 18-month check, her language explosion and her growing skills.

Her (actually) 23-month check bumped her up and out of the bottom of the Bell curve for height and weight and she's firmly in the 60th-ish percentiles for both. Thanks to her dad, her head circumference knocked it right out of the park (as usual) and stayed above 95%. She's 34" tall and weighs 27#. She's still a pixie compared to her bruiser-sized big sis, but she's a big little person now!

The ped was thrilled with her growth and her overall Miss-O-ness, so she said we could count this as her 2-year check and come back when she's three. Go LuLu!

She's acquiring language at a rapid pace now, after essentially 20-ish months of the bare minimums. She is enamored of princesses, which sounds more like "pin-sis", and pumpkins "pum-pin", and says everything as many times as she sees an object. In other words, if there are four princesses in a picture, there is a "pin-sis" to announce each and every one of them. Driving around a neighborhood yields a ton of joyous "Hi pum-pin!"s, although that's tapering off as Thanksgiving approaches.

I do things just to get a reaction out of her. At night, she will, on rare occasions, want me to sing a song. On the other nights, I'll start singing something just to get her to put out a hand and ask me to "Top, mama". I'll sing the opening lines to anything I can think of to get her to stop me because it's so. stinkin. cute.

She's also bound and determined to do everything herself. Everything. And gets mad if you do it for her or make a move to do it for her. She'll insist "LuLu DO IT!" where do and it run together into one indignant doit! She can climb everything at the playgrounds now, and will slide down anything. She even took on the big girl swings the other day. When she (inevitably) fell, she cried a little, stood up and looked at me, with tears still on her cheeks, and said "more swing?"

She's also potty-curious. The other night, while she was in the tub, she said "pee-pee" and got out and peed on her potty!!

She actually told me "poo-poo" the previous time she took a bath, and I took her out to try on the potty, but she didn't go. Put her back in the tub and a few minutes later heard her wailing forlornly "pooo-pooo!" Sure as, well, sure as sh*t, she had pooped in the tub. Meanwhile, Bean was playing with her back to Lu, blissfully unaware of the party foul that had occurred behind her. It took a few "everybody out of the pool!" yells to even break her concentration enough for her to realize what had happened. And even then, the reaction wasn't a freaked out "Doodie!", but a low-key "LuLu pooped in the tub." and a casual climb out.

Course then I had to move them to my tub, get out my haz-mat suit and clean out their tub, including an overnight bleaching for tub and toys. *Sigh*. Meanwhile they're splashing away in my room, overjoyed at being in mommy's big bathtub. Or, to Bean, "mommy's pool!"

I'll close, since it's way past my bedtime, with the most brilliant Beanism to date: "I wish Brett Favre was my daddy. Do you with Brett Favre was my daddy, mommy? I love Brett Favre. And I love my old daddy too."

If only ...
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