300th post, and milestones update

This post marks my 300th post! I have quite a lot to say, huh? :)

I realized that I haven't updated lately with Raegan's milestones, so I figured I should do that while I'm thinking of it.

More and more every day it seems like Raegan is more of a little girl and less of a baby. Weekly, and sometimes even daily, she is doing new things. I'm always in awe of how very smart she is. I know every parent thinks that their child is so smart, but I don't think it's just me being her mom. She can count to ten, you guys! TEN. For the longest time, she would start at 2 and count to 10, but this week she's started counting with the number one. Sometimes she will point at objects and count, but she doesn't always use one number for one object, and when she's doing that she usually trails off around five or six. I love the way she says five, with a "sh" sound on the end instead of a "v". Raegan is also starting to use color words, although she's not correctly naming any colors yet. She mostly says that things are blue or yellow. She has an Elmo alphabet book that she has pretty much memorized, and in certain parts of the book she can tell you what letter is coming next. As soon as you start reading the page that says "Iguana starts with I" she will immediately say J. She points to words and letters and calls them all E. :) These are all awesome skills that I look for in the 3 year olds I teach, so I'm pretty pumped that she's starting to show some literacy skills before the age of 2. She still loves to read, and we start off every day with book after book after book. :)

Raegan's nervousness about going to the pool has pretty much disappeared. She's still not a fan of deep water where she can't touch, but she loves going to the baby pool! One of her recent new words is "swimsuit." She's also so fearless when it comes to climbing and playing at the park. She loves the slides and the climbing structures. She had no fear of going through any of the play places at Silver Dollar City. I'm glad that she doesn't have the paralyzing fear of heights that I did as a child.

Her vocabulary is expanding daily. She's starting to use three word sentences/phrases more frequently. She knows the names for about every animal under the sun, and can do the noises for just as many. :) One of Raegan's favorite things to say right now is "What's that?" If we go somewhere new, she immediately asks about our new surroundings and wants to figure everything out. When we say prayers before bed, she has suggestions for what we should pray about now, usually involving saying thank you for all of her friends from daycare. She has three in particular that she names off multiple times.

Hopefully this weekend we're going to break out the toddler bed and start transitioning her to that. She tends to have a hard time sleeping in new beds (see: blogs about our vacation!) so we're starting now with the hopes that she'll be settled in by the time I go back to work and not too tired in the mornings. She still wants to sit on the potty before bath, and randomly throughout the day, but she's not really going in it yet. She will tell you the instant she is wet or poopy (she calls it all "poopy") but she's not quite there yet in letting us know beforehand. I kind of want to get the bed transition taken care of before we start focusing on potty training more intensely.

I can't believe that Raegan is almost two! It seems like just yesterday she was my brand new baby.