two years + seven months

Wow, 31 months and just in time!  Amidst moving, traveling, and visiting, another month has flown by.   Avery continues to light up our life and I know I’ve said this many times along the way, but this is truly such a fun age!!

At 31 months Avery loves to play!  And play!  And play some more!  Seriously, she loves to play.  She is also a fan of Diego, babies, M&Ms,  Max & Ruby, reading, and in general being the sweetest girl ever...mostly.

She LOVES M&Ms, they're her favorite candy.  We recently made M&M bars and they were a huge hit.  She is eating better every month which is great news!  She really loves these cookie bars my mom makes so Nana has said she will ship them.  Though when we were playing last night and Avery was feeding me faux cookie bars I spit it out because I said she put raisins in them.  Then today when my mom gave her a cookie bar she didn't want to eat it because she didn't want raisins...there were no raisins of course, but that girl surely remembers what she hears.

She dislikes going to sleep.  That's pretty much it, really.  She sometimes pretends to get mad about things but having to go to sleep garners the most genuine tears.  Bedtime can be tragic but every night we remind her that she can get up and play in the morning!

One thing that's really been a bummer over the last month is allergies and asthma.  I remember panicking in the midst of an asthma attack as a young child and thinking that I was going to die because I couldn't breathe.  I would say watching my young child with asthma is way worse than that, I just want to take a deep breath for her!  I really love her new Austin pediatrician and we're all being proactive in her care so we only had one serious bout this month and we kind of just assess each day as needed.  That's the way it goes!  Avery is a trooper through it all, she's really the most amazing sick kid ever.  She was pretty bad off, I mean she'd been through two breathing treatments and a round of steroids at the doctor's office and was still playing and talking and acting like Avery.  I think that actually made the doctor feel better that it didn't get her down so she finally let us go home!  :)

She still LOVES babies of any kind.  She has imaginary babies and baby dolls that fill her play time.  We play a lot together and I'm always the baby.  It's really fun for me because I like to act like her and see how she reacts.  She was making me take some medicine so I dramatically pretended to spit things out and said that I didn't want to take it.  She took my face in her hands and said, "Baby, you have to take you medicine.  Jesus not want you to be mad like that.  Take you medicine."  OH MY GOODNESS.  It was so difficult to keep a straight face.  And speaking of Jesus, Avery has been wanting to play like I'm Mary and she's the baby Jesus all the time.  So with a dishcloth on my head, pretending to be Mary, I tell her about Jesus and what he did when he grew up.  Then when I say, what are you going to do Baby Jesus?  She'll say something like, "Um, read a book. And play."  I'm sure He did those things too. 

Oh, the things she says!  We seriously do LOVE LOVE LOVE this age and stage.  Yes, some days are trying and I wonder what happened to the formerly agreeable, sweetest disposition, calm tot I thought I had for a minute - BUT, she is who she is and she's the best.  Deran & I really are so beyond happy she's ours.

 Happy 31 month birthday sweet girl, we love you lots!