Messy Madi

When looking through recent pictures of Madison, I realized that most of them were of her being messy. I guess that's toddlers for ya, right?

These first two were from this last week. I looked up online a trail to go take the kids on a walk. I packed up some food to make sandwiches there so we could have a nice picnic and spend a good couple hours outside. We drove the 20 minutes to get there, and it was a nice, sunny day. Only problem is it's super duper muddy right now because all the snow is melting/melted. We walk for a few minutes and then come to this fun playground, and the kids are dying to play on it. So we stop to play and 10 minutes into it, Madison wanders off the paved path and steps right into a massive pile of mud. She falls and catches herself with her hands. So now she is covered in mud, and it's cold, and it's her naptime so she's not happy about it. We leave the playground and walk back to the car to try and clean her up with wet wipes. I realize it's going to take a whole lot of wet wipes to get this taken care of, and I'm getting muddy in the process of trying to get her clean. So we bag the whole trip and get in the car and go back home. Lessons I learned: Never put the kids in white jackets to go play outside until the mud is gone. Don't let them go out without their boots on. Stop trying to bring the double stroller when a baby carrier would work so much better.

Thanks to her extreme independence, she has quickly learned how to use utensils to eat. It also results in a HUGE mess after every single meal, but we're getting there. I have to get her out as soon as she's done eating or she rubs it all in her hair and dumps what's left on the floor. Awesome.

green smoothie

fruit smoothie

spaghetti

This girl's a basket case :)

Obvious influence of Brynlee: dress-up and snow hat over regular clothes


Oh I love this little girl so much, even if we have been going through a rough patch. I've started doing time-outs with her, "Super Nanny" style and it's actually working. I still think distraction is the best thing you can do for toddlers, the majority of the time. But when she's hitting, or yelling "No!" at me, we do time-outs and she gets it. I thought she would be too young for it, and that it wouldn't even make sense to her. But one day I had the thought, "if she's smart enough to be doing all these things, she's smart enough for a time out". And it's true. I'm still scared to go in public with her because things can unravel so very very quickly, but life at home is getting better and that's pretty much where we are all the time anyway :). 

 Madison really is incredibly sweet and playful, and has these long eyelashes over her gorgeous brown eyes that melt my heart. She is repeating words we say all the time and it's so cute to hear her talk. We are counting down the Sundays until she's old enough to go to nursery!! (5...in case you were wondering :) She is a really good eater. Her favorite food is fruit of any kind, but mostly banans and strawberries. Also, she won't ever say "da da". She still calls Kenny "mama" and it's so funny...which may be why she does that.