My almost-2-year-old

My sweet Caroline Harper will be turning 2 on Monday.  TWO YEARS OLD!!!  I still haven't quite wrapped my mind around that.  But I'm not here to talk about me, I'm here to talk about this little fire cracker:

She is such a little ball of energy these days.  Sleep may be alusive, but energy?  No sir-ee.  The energy is here to stay!  (By the way, THANK YOU all so much for the encouragement on my last blog post.  You have no idea how many times I've gone back and re-read them this week.  And chanted my cousin Barb's wise words, "It gets better...it gets better..."  We're having good days and bad days right now with the sleep.  I'm hopeful that she'll settle into more of a normal pattern again soon, but until then I'm just drinking lots of coffee.  Sorry Ellie.)

 A few days ago she decided she wanted Mommy to take pictures of her in order that she could then see herself on the camera.  She did lots of posing:


(hugging her "dobbles" - weeble wobbles from Aunt Kelsey & Uncle Brent)



 ...and then she'd run over to me to look through the new pictures.  Crack me up.

 She absolutely LOVES being outdoors.  Digging in the garden, playing with sidewalk chalk, going for walks, whatever.  The girl is in heaven when she's not contained by walls.  Last weekend we hit up a local park and she was about beside herself with happiness.  It is so much fun to do stuff like this with her now!

 We end up with lots of bumps and bruises, though.  She's not the most graceful kid (let's hope this is just a phase and not an inherited trait from her mother!), but she is tough.  Skinned up forehead & nose, bloody knees - we've seen it all lately.  But she usually bounces back faster than me in these situations.

She also loves animals right now.  Yesterday Memaw (Dan's Mom) came over and went to the zoo with us. Ellie slept the whole time snuggled up in my wrap, and Caroline had a BLAST.  Here she is checking out one of her favorite exhibits, the mere cats (which if you ask her about the animal at the zoo, she's likely to tell you about the monkeys & the mere cats). 

I believe there were leopards in there...and Caroline really wanted to go inside with them.  And she wanted to play in the creek.  Mommy was firm on both requests. 

Memaw even took her on a train ride!  I'm not sure who enjoyed it more :)

That's all for now.  I need to run and finish cleaning up a little incident involving my 6 week old and lots of poop.  Our days are certainly full around here!  Full and busy and exhausting...and some of the sweetest I've ever experienced, too.  I love my girls so much.  And this almost-two-year-old of ours brings more joy and laughter to our lives than we ever thought possible.