Kadri's 2nd Birthday

So our little girl is two. I don't know how it happened so fast, but it did. Here are a few photos of her special day. (Well, here are most the of still photos of her special day. I'm pretty sure I'll end up posting all but the one blurry photo we took. If I had the patience I'd probably do all the vidoes too, but I seriously doubt I have that much patience.)
Birthday Dinner was spaghetti, for the second year in a row. Lame? No. I don't think so. We knew she'd eat it. After all, who wants to have their special day dinner be something they aren't willing to eat?

This year she has moved up to a "big person" stool and ate her dinner with a fork, thus NOT requiring a clothing change between dinner and present opening.

Birthday guests at 9:00!!

Play-doh! Which Mom and Dad still haven't had the guts to let her play with. She did get to play with some at Nursery today and seemed to do okay. Maybe someday we'll break it out...

Opening the dump-truck and Mega Bloks she pulled off the shelf and didn't stop playing with for the duration of our last trip to Ross.

Playing in the tent from Grandma Philips.

Playing peek-a-boo from the tent from Grandma Philips. Incidentally she was quite excited about the two dollars she recieved in her card from Grandma and Grandpa Pulley. She showed them off to everyone and immediately gave them to Uncle Brian. We assume for safe keeping because she knows he works at a bank.

The birthay treats. She blew out her two candles on her free Barnes and Noble/Cheesecake Factory Cupcake and chowed down on the frosting (we only have video of this part of the party), while the rest of us had Chocolate/Strawberry Revel Bars, because Mommy wasn't in the mood for cake.

And finally, this photo had nothing to do with her birthday, but it sure did make me laugh when I saw it!

I just can't decide...

...which of these darling photos of my beautiful daughter to post for the viewing pleasure of Kadri's Grandma Philips, so I'll just post them all.



Don't those blue eyes just about knock your socks off?

And thanks Aunt Janelle for the hand-me-down outfit. We've had a lot of compliments on it.

Just to take a few moments and update (brag) these are a few of Kadri's latest achievements:

1. She recognizes all of the capital letters of the alphabet, and can mostly tell you a word that begins with each of the letters. (Thanks Aunt Janelle for the alphabet puzzle that has made this possible.)
2. She can mostly count to ten. She used to leave out the number 4. Now that 4 has made it into the sequence, she leaves out the number 7.
3. She is learning some of the words to I Am A Child of God. We can sing part of a phrase and she can fill in a lot of the words.
4. One of her Mommy's favorite phrases she says is, "Where is Daddy go?" when she notices he has walked out of a room.
5. One of her Daddy's favorite phrases is "Howie's stinker." (He also likes it when she calls things "icky".)
6. She loves fruit. LOVES IT! We're talking she'd already eaten four clementines before 10:00 in the morning today.
7. She can name most of the animals we see at the zoo, and says hi to them by species. i.e. Hi, Giraffe. Hi, elephant. Hi, monkey. etc.
8. She literally wakes up bouncing almost every morning, with a chipper "Boing, boing, boing" to accompany each bounce. We know first thing if it's going to be a good day.
9. It has been sixteen months since she has learned to go up and down the stairs and she hasn't yet taken a spill. (Knock on wood! We've got a lot of stairs! And the stairs are the only place she likes to play catch, which Mommy DOESN'T love.)
10. She loves babies. She gets excited every time we see a child she assumes is even a day younger than her and wants to go ooh and aah over it. We think this is a pretty good thing, since TKPulley Baby #2 is due to arrive at the end of March (for any of you who don't already know - ANNOUNCEMENT! ANNOUNCEMENT! People started noticing in church today so the news is out).

Halloween at the Pulley House

Halloween at our house started on the Monday before Halloween, when we carved our pumpkin, which was, as always, our one and only Halloween decoration.

This is how most of the project went: Tim carved the details, while Kadri played in a cup of water and with the spray bottle you see here.

The master artist hard at work. I eventually cleaned out the guts, which were surprisingly less messy than what I remember as a child. Maybe it was a dry pumpkin.


Kadri "contributing."

Final inspection.

The end result. Kadri dubbed him "Happy Cheeks." We didn't think he looked very happy (at least that wasn't the intent), but we went with it.

We didn't do much in the way of Trick-or-Treating. We went to our ward Trunk-or-Treat on Saturday night, and Kadri received a fair amount of candy that we all snacked on. On Halloween we didn't Trick-or-Treat to a single house, nor did we have single Trick-or-Treater for the fourth year in a row. So we enjoyed the candy we had on hand just in case we had one or two stragglers, and I mean really enjoyed it because this year we bought GOOD stuff that we like. Not just the cheap stuff.

We didn't manage to get any pictures of Kadri at the ward Trunk-or-Treat. On Halloween we didn't even manage to get Kadri in clothes, let alone in her costume. But when I had some time I did dress her up in her Sleeping Beauty dress and take these SUPER CUTE photos on another day.

This is how we roll.

We bought Kadri the Easter dress that I fell in love with two days before Easter. It was darling on her. We finally had a professional photo taken of her in it at the end of July. And just today did we manage to get it scanned so that I can post it here. Yup. That's pretty much how we roll, but she is still darling!

My daughter: The tree hugger

She talks to trees too. I'm not sure what she was saying, but it was quite a long hug and conversation. She's a nut!

Emma

Kadri loves her cousin Emma. Every time I open the laptop to do anything on the computer Kadri runs up and says, "Emma". Which means she wants to look at pictures or watch videos of Emma. We watch a certain Emma video from Aunt Nik's blog no less than ten times in a row at least once a day. This is Kadri watching the video.

She and Emma have been rehearsing this duo for some time via internet and are pretty much ready for a parent recital performance. They are becoming great friends as well as close cousins. In other news, Kadri's #2 favorite is the red, furry Elmo... whom she loves very much as well... and who's name was interchangeable with Emma's for a short period.

Have you ever seen such blue eyes?