22 Months and 15 Weeks

Well, I'm not doing a very good job at keeping up with the blogs, am I??? Maybe after we move and get settled I'll get back into a good routine again! For now, my days are filled with packing up boxes, repacking the ones that Claire unpacks, and taking things out of boxes when Claire tries to "help." Just a couple of weeks left here in the place we've come to call "home." We surely will miss this place and these wonderful people, but we are excited about the opportunities that God will give us to grow and to serve when we move.

Anyway, here are some things I would love to remember about Claire at 22 months old...


My favorite new development is her new-found love of singing. She will often sing with me when I am singing, and if I exaggerate the last word of each line she will quickly catch on and sing that particular word with me. She also loves to make up songs, sometimes consisting of nonsense sounds and sometimes made up of words strung together. I could listen to her sing all day long!

We think we figured out her "squint" face. She will often look at us with squinty eyes to make us laugh, and we recently discovered (we think) the reason for this: My eyes disappear when I smile. They always have. I have been told that I smile with my whole face, and my eyes just go all squinty when I'm really happy...Well, if you tell Claire to "smile like Mommy," she'll make her squinty face!!!

Claire's favorite new discovery is Play-doh. Oh, she loves it. And everything she makes is a "snake."


While she loves the kind of bubbles that you blow outside on a summer day, she is terrified of bubbles in the bathtub. I've never seen anything like it. It's slightly hilarious.

Claire loves to read. At about 7:00 each night, she will walk on over to her bookshelf, grab a book, and request to read on the couch. We will read together for at least 30 minutes, sometimes even an hour! I never thought she would get to the point where she would sit still through one book, let alone an hour's worth! But she loves it. And she is also starting to "read" by herself at times. The other day I heard her chattering and peeked in her room. She was sitting in the rocking chair "reading" her Bible. This is what I heard..."blah-blah-blah...Jesus...blah-blah...water...blah-blah...night-night (I could see the picture and it was the story where Jesus was asleep in the boat during the storm!)...blah-blah-blah...tee-tee...poo-poo..." Oh, well, the story was going really well until the end.

Claire continues to adore Ivy. Here she is with Ivy and Ivy's new baby sister...


She is starting to use more and more phrases and short sentences. My favorite is when she wants something really badly but she can't quite remember how to say it, she will default to, "I want me!"

The other night I took Claire to the park to run off some energy before bedtime. She literally ran off some energy. There is a walking track that is 4/10 of a mile long at the rec park, and she seriously ran around the entire track, only stopping once to go down the slide about halfway around the track. At this rate she'll be running a 5k by the time she's four.

New concepts she is learning or at least gaining more understanding: colors (she can identify pink, purple, blue, green, red, and yellow); letters (she can point out pretty much all the letters of the alphabet and also knows what sound most of them make); and numbers...Up until today I thought she didn't really get numbers at all yet because she counts like this: "2...2...2...1...2...1...2...2..." And then today while we were riding in the car I started counting and then stopping suddenly and Claire called out the next number in the sequence...and she did this all the way from 1 to 10!!! So that was pretty exciting. I had no idea she had that good of an understanding of number sequence!

She loves her baby brother or sister. She thinks the baby is in my belly button and sometimes I'll even catch her pulling her shirt up and looking intently at her own belly button, as if a baby might be in there. Sometimes she'll come up and say, "Hey baby!" and tonight she started laughing and then tickling me, saying "Tickle baby!!!"

Speaking of baby, he/she is now 15 weeks! We got to see our little love about a week ago on an ultrasound, and in two weeks we go back to try to determine if the little peanut is a he or a she! Baby was resting comfortably at first, but once the ultrasound started to poke and prod, he/she woke up and put on a show! Kicking, doing flips, sucking thumb...What a little ham! I have actually been able to feel this baby move for about 3 weeks already. I was amazed when I actually felt the first flutters at 12 weeks. What an amazing feeling!

Alright, no promises, but I'll do my best to keep the updates coming!