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?

Kadri News

I was going to say that "Sometimes it surprises me to realize how grown-up Kadri has become in sixteen months." That's a little bit inaccurate. It surprises me at least several times a day how quickly my baby is becoming a little girl. There is pretty much no baby left in her. As you can see in the photo below. I took this photo before I left for work on the day she went to spend a few days with my sister and fam while Tim went out of town for my birthday. The whole morning as I was hanging out with her I just marvelled at how grown-up she seemed.

Today I had her sit in her chair long enough for me to put in her first pigtails. So cute!

Kadri spends a lot of her day hanging out in this drawer. She dumps out every toy we own and then sits in there to play with her toys or stands in it to watch Signing Time dvd's.

Look at that cute smile! And those cute teeth! Can you guess how many she has? I thought she had only four until a couple days ago, when I discovered that number five had made its way through her little gums. Then earlier today I noticed that number six is on its way. I wondered how soon we'd see seven or eight, but I made another discovery while I was holding her down to brush her teeth tonight... She has at least three molars through already! YIPES! She may have number four but she was done with me poking my fingers or her toothbrush around her mouth by that point. I love to watch her do all this growing up, but does she have to do it so fast?