Too much for one day

I have way too much to update you all on to fit in one post so I'll just list a few of Madeleine's latest developments first.

1. We officially said goodbye to the bottle a week ago. Since last Monday Madeleine has used some special Elmo sippy cups she picked out for her milk. I'm really proud of how well she transitioned, although our collection of Elmo memorabilia continues to grow.

2. Madeleine LOVES jewelry! She raided my beaded necklaces and bracelets and decided that they looked better on her. Fortunately, Grammie (my mom) sent Madeleine a small treasure chest of necklaces, bracelets, and rings which should keep her out of my stash :)

3. The girl's vocab is growing! The other day she came up to us and pointed to the color blue in one of her books and said "bue." Not perfect but she's getting it all on her own! She's also added socks, green, car, jeep, baby, Zoe (a Sesame Street character), "where's that cat" (a book title), and (my personal favorite) Costco to her repertoire. Every day she seems to try saying new things much to our entertainment.

4. She caught my ick. It's bad enough being sick myself but seeing my kiddos share in the congestion is horrible. There's only so much we can do for her; we can't even put a humidifier in her room because it brings out the smell of cigarette smoke which we can only assume is left over from the previous owners. So for now she blows her nose, drinks as much fluids as she wants, takes longs naps and warm showers with me. We hope this passes quickly.

That's all I have time for today but I'll try to get more out on Parker tomorrow. Thanks for the comments; I guess in some sick way I was trying to guilt you into commenting more but it's the only way I know people actually read this stuff. So even if it's a simple hello, I greatly appreciate it.