Road trips, Christmas, Chinese New Year, Snow and Turning 2 . . .

It has been a long while since I last posted. Who would have thought that one small child could keep me so busy ~ obviously not me. So here is the short version of the last few months:

Since my last post we have taken two road trips (Are we there yet?) to visit grandparents. The good news is we had great visits. The bad news is our built-in DVD player did not work and the car time was awful. Journey absolutely does not like sitting in her car seat for long periods (who can blame her?) and even though we stopped frequently, it wasn’t enough for her and she let us know at the top of her lungs. I have to say, the kid is persistent. We have had the car into the dealership twice to have the player repaired and don’t plan on taking any more road trips until we’re sure it works.

Christmas was definitely much more fun this year and Journey quickly learned that presents were a good thing. She did pretty well at not touching the tree – I’m sure she wondered why we had put that big thing in our living room.

We also celebrated Chinese New Year, the year of the Rabbit, by attending a couple of celebrations. Our friends from China helped us with the traditions.

We had LOTS of snow this winter and Journey was not sure what to think about it. She received some beach toys for her birthday and they worked great for playing in the snow.

On February 5th we celebrated her second birthday. I took some time to reflect on how much she has grown since we brought her home in July, both physically and emotionally. She is still quite a little character, mischievous and charming people with her smile. She has learned the sounds of the all the letters in the alphabet and can name most of them. Her vocabulary has grown, although Doug says I’m the only one who can identify the words. Even though we don’t understand all of what she says, she is quite happy to chatter away most of her waking hours and she has started singing songs (her own) with lots of hand movements and in a very loud voice. She especially likes to do this when we are grocery shopping, so we get quite a few looks.