Milestones and Snow

This past while it has seemed to Nate and me that Lydia has been trying to approach her milestones too quickly.  I would have been quite content with a baby who was happy to sit upright by herself and play with toys I choose to give her, yet we got a little explorer who decided to crawl at 6 months old.  A couple weeks ago, when we momentarily had lost track of Lydia, Nate found her on the 2nd step of the stairs.  With Nate trailing behind her, she proceeded to make it up to the 5th step, all by herself.  That particular staircase is wide and curved, and I don't know of any gate I could put up there to block her. We have gates at the tops of our two staircases at least. 

We wrote in a previous post that Lydia had also gotten her teeth out of order.  Her top side teeth still don't show when you look at her from a normal angle while she smiles, but we orchestrated some smiles with the camera positioned below her to show off her cute little teeth.  We are still waiting on the top front middle teeth. 

Though she doesn't do it very well, Lydia also cruises along furniture and window sills.  She has even walked 6-7 steps while pushing a walker.  The ironic part is that she could do all this before she mastered sitting upright independently.  I'm pretty sure she would have perfected the sitting skill earlier if she been interested, but alas, sitting was boring to her.

Without putting in the effort, she somehow has become a good sitter now too, but only after having been very mobile crawling for over a month, and after already cruising furniture.  Today (Valentine's Day) is also Lydia's 8 month birthday.  She is a happy, sweet little thing. 

Although Karina is bossy about what toys Lydia can and can't play with, she is a good and loving big sister.  When Karina does try to bully Lydia to keep her from things like getting into Snoopy's water dish or playing with Karina's LEGOs, Lydia has become good at defending herself from big sister.  She shrieks at Karina and tries to bypass her with all her strength.  I imagine they will both love and dislike each other a lot in the future. 

Karina continues to love building LEGO towers.  She calls them Cinderella castles, which she happens to also be obsessed with.  She frequently tells us that for her birthday (in April) that she wants the Cinderella movie, Cinderella's castle (the LEGO Duplo set), ice cream, and birthday cake with lots of chocolate.  I'm sure she will get her way.  She absolutely adores Cinderella though - it is very cute. 

Another tall tower barely shorter than her:

We got quite a bit of snow a couple nights ago. We measured 14 inches after the first part of the storm.  Then we got some rain, some hail, and then more snow.  I'm not sure of the total amount because there was some melting in between.  We have such a long driveway that Nate and Karina spent all morning two days in a row clearing out snow. 

They also built a lovely snowman, complete with scarf, ribbon mouth, carrot nose, stick arms, and some grass from the landscaping for eyes.  Karina was quite proud of it.

It was so warm this afternoon that the snowman has already collapsed.  

For Valentine's Day, Karina and I made a chocolate cream pie and there is a little girl who adored eating the crust and filling.  I am guilty of loving to sneak some yummy batter, but Karina is hard to stop.  Her messy face is evidence of the havoc she wreaked on the pie.