My sweet funny girl

Aubrey is as cute and funny as ever these days. Really, just when I think she can't get any more fun, she does. I love being around her, and I'm so happy to get to hang out with her everyday. She has said and done some funny things lately, and I just wanted to write some of them down :)

She is quite the little drama queen. This morning, she and Jude were playing on the floor. She looked at me with a brokenhearted expression on her face and said, "Mommy! Jude keeps crawling away from me, so I'm going to go into your room and lay on that "ting" (thing) and CRY!" (I'm pretty sure "that ting" was the ottoman that we have in our room. She lays across it and cries when she is feeling especially broken hearted over something.) She didn't end up having to go take a cry break after all, though. Guess Jude started cooperating ;)

She is very loving.... on her own terms. Sometimes, I'll ask her for a hug or a kiss and she will say no. I will then say something like, "Awww, that makes me sad! I want a kiss from my girl!" She will reply, "I love you, Mommy, but I don't want to kiss you right now." Haha! Well, alrighty then. But she makes up for it when she runs to me randomly and hugs my legs and tells me that she loves me with NO prompting. Best feeling ever!

The other day, David asked her for a kiss, and she said that she "didn't have any kisses right now." I told her that she did because I could see one on her lips. She thought about that for a minute and then gave us kisses! I couldn't believe that worked!

Aubrey has always LOVED my brother, Joel. My brother Michael is pretty hit or miss with Aubrey, though. Sometimes it seems like it's mostly miss. Bless his heart; he tries so hard to win her love! When we used to ask Aubrey if she liked Uncle Michael, she would say no. We told her that wasn't very nice, so now she will say that she likes Michael "a little bit." Ha! But then sometimes she says that she liked Michael yesterday, but she doesn't like him today. She's such a girl!

Speaking of yesterday and today, Aubrey thinks every time she goes to bed and gets up, it's a new day. So, when she wakes up from her nap, everything that happened that morning was yesterday. We only let her watch one movie a day, and she usually watches it in the morning. She asks to watch another one when she gets up from her nap, and when I tell her that she's already watched one that day, she tells me that that was yesterday. She can't understand why I don't let her watch a movie some days!

Aubrey can count to 12 or 13 by herself. Once she gets to that point, she just starts repeating random numbers. The other day I decided that I should start working with her on this and teach her to count higher. (I've never taught her any numbers; We really don't know how she learned to count as much as she has.) So, after she got to 12, I kept counting, and she would repeat each number after me. We counted to 20, and after she repeated 20, she paused and said, "You didn't say twentyTEEN!" I told her that 20 was just 20. No teen. She didn't really buy that, though. She said again, "You mean twentyTEEN." ;) I have realized lately what a little sponge Aubrey is right now, and I decided that I need to take advantage of that and really be more purposeful about teaching her things.

She knows all of her colors, and that gets me in trouble now. She thinks that if she's wearing a pink shirt, she has to wear pink shoes. If I try to put her white sandals on her, she will tell me that those shoes "don't match because they're white, not pink." I'm trying to explain to her that white goes with almost everything, and that all pinks do NOT match each other ;)

Aubrey still has a crazy memory when it comes to clothes. We went to Bible Study on Tuesday, and David was asking Aubrey about who she played with in the nursery when he got home. She named several children, and then she started telling David what all of them had on. I couldn't remember all of the ones she told him about, but the ones that I did remember, she got right! That's just so crazy to me!

She notices when things are different before I do sometimes. David cleaned out my car the other day, and I didn't even notice right away because I was busy getting Jude and then Aubrey buckled into their carseats. While I was buckling Aubrey, she was looking down at the floorboard. She then asked, "Why is anything not down there, Mommy?" I looked, and sure enough, my car was clean! It cracks David up that our two year old is sometimes more observant than I am. Haha!

I think Aubrey has a great vocabulary and communicates very well. She does get a few words wrong right now, but I think it's cute and don't worry about correcting her at this point. I just think she will pick up the correct words on her own soon. An example of this is that she says "what" instead of "that." She says, "These are the shoes what Daddy put on me." This is really the only example I can think of, so there obviously aren't a lot of words that she messes up.

She is getting more and more self-sufficient. When we are at home, she goes to the bathroom all by herself. I go make sure she's all clean, but she usually doesn't even need my help. She likes to dress herself, and she LOVES to pick out her own clothes (although, I don't let her do that ALL the time ;). She is very specific about how she wants to wear her hair. Her FAVORITE hairdo is a ponytail. She asks to wear her hair in a ponytail every single day. Sometimes I let her, but other times I tell her that I want to be able to see her pretty curls :) She still has never had a haircut!

I love watching Aubrey learn and develop into more of a "little girl" and less of a "toddler." When I start to get sad about Jude getting so old, I look at Aubrey and remember how every stage is the BEST stage. I sometimes wish that I could just freeze time and keep my children exactly as they are now for a while, but then I remind myself that if I had done that a few months ago, I would be missing out on this. And this with my children is the best stage yet!