This time my excuse for not posting lately will be this:Someone thinks she controls all of the computers in the house.

Occasionally (despite what seems like lots of rainy weather lately) we get outside for a bit of this:
Though we've also had some of this:
Benjamin worked late on his birthday (again) and Lily got impatient waiting for him to come home and pulled the icecream cake off the counter and it landed face-down. Awesome.

And this weekend we had an early morning discussion about the importance of not writing on doors. (Good thing the door still needs a second coat of paint anyway. Maybe someday we'll do that.)

Sigh...

Love!

Today Lily said "I love Henry!" (Henry is Anna's mangy dog on the left.) She's been saying "I love you" to people when i tell her to, but this was the first time she ever said she loved something. And it's a dog that's not even ours.

PS- This picture was not posed. Anna and I were sitting at her picnic table talking and I turned around to see Lily just standing like that with the dogs. :)

Still Here :)

Well we've had plenty of complaints about not updating the blog, so here's a picture to tide you over. :) Benjamin took some nice pictures over the weekend but I don't have time to sort, upload, crop, etc right now, so that will have to wait. Also, my laptop is on the verge of death so it's hard to do anything, really.

Anyhoo- Lily is cruising towards 2 and it shows. She is smart, funny, fierce, and independent. She is quirky and sweet and still doesn't sleep as much as we would like (still wakes at least once a night), which is getting increasingly difficult for me to deal with as I'm now 15 weeks pregnant and need all the sleep I can get. Fortunately Benjamin has been able to get her back to sleep a few times without my help. Yay! Speaking of Benjamin, anyone who wants updates can feel free to nag him instead of me. ;)

You learn something new every day

Today she learned how to operate the sprayer.

I left her alone for a minute, round the corner, and there she was, going all Ghostbusters with the hose:








For days, every time she goes outside she asks whoever is around (me, Lanie, the neighbors) to fill her watering can. Now I guess she doesn't need to ask...


And finally, watering the tomato plants. Normally when she "waters the tomatoes", she literally pours water on the individual tomatoes from her watering can, so the hose is actually an improvement.


Then we went inside and ate dinner, and so did some passing fawns, though outside, under the apple tree.



Also today she learned how to chew around and spit out the pit from a cherry. Even if we had pictures of that, you probably wouldn't want to see them...

Like father like daughter

She saw a frog tonight, and pronounces it like I'm told I did at her age:

Here's the frog - a tiny thing, in case you're curious:

20 Months!

Here are the pictures from last weekend's dinner that Benjamin didn't get (because he's obviously busy taking pictures of Lily, as usual.) :)
Not much to see here, except Lily chomping some cobbler:
And what we've been up to lately...Making pizza with Maya and Meg. (This was taken a little while before Lily got hurt while they were fighting over the oven door. I was not a happy babysitter.)
Anyway, Lily is 20 months old today. 20 months! She's basically a two year old now. :( And it shows! Here she is throwing a fit about something boot-related (not unusual):
And crying with a mouth full of dirt after trying to climb into her wagon and doing a face-plant on the driveway. :(
But she's a smart, happy girl most of the time. I've been letting her pick out her own clothes some mornings. Here she is stylin' in her pink velour pants and her Peanuts tshirt:
And we've been spending most mornings at Rocky Ridge playing on the slides.
Check out her awesome morning hair. :)
Those pictures were clearly taken before this current heat wave. She's wearing far less clothing the past few days. My mom was in Florida from Saturday until last night and she said it was cooler there than it is here. Yesterday around 4 (and 102 degrees) our power went out (fantastic!) which woke Lily up from her nap (and yes, 4 is late to be napping but she refused to go down until after 2:30) so we met Benjamin in Lititz and had dinner with Kelly and Joe. We got home a little after 7 and fortunately our power had come back on around 6:30. It turns out that 38,000 people in York County were without power yesterday. You can read all about it here (I thought there may be some engineers in the family that might want the details.) :)

Knee-high by the fourth

What a weekend!

Saturday night we had Anna & Josh and Ian & Christina, none of whom are pictured, over for dinner, also not pictured, followed by delicious blackberry cobbler:


Sunday afternoon, lunch with Lanie's dad and lots of aunts, uncles, and cousins:




This morning after breakfast we went up to Rocky Ridge (the park way up the hill) and walked around:




This afternoon, Lily made friends with some sheep:




This video starts a little slow, but you can see her trying to feed the sheep some grass:


Bye bye sheep:


On the way back from the sheep, walking through the woods, Lily spotted four oak trees growing together and demanded to be put down in the middle of them:


and climbed around in her flip flops:


extensively...



What a weekend.

Happy Grandfather's Day

This was the day Lily signed the card for grandpa:

First she woke up and demanded to read some books (specifically, "Hop on Pop", which she refers to as "pop pop pop.")

Then we headed downstairs, and she was very excited to sign:

All done!

Time for breakfast:

That evening, we took a walk, and she pretended to nap (complete with snoring):

"all done."

Time Flies

So sorry for the lack of recent updates. I haven't managed to get very good pictures lately, and Lily is a very busy girl (doing what, exactly, I'm not sure. I just know that we're all exhausted at the end of every day.) There is, of course, a lot of reading:Both upside-down and right-side-up:
And a recent trip to the Carter's outlet where Lily fell in love with a pair of purple rainboots:
She likes to wear them while swiffering:
Every time I get out the broom to sweep she runs to the closet to get the swiffer to "help" me clean. She is constantly talking about "messes" and describes things as messy. She's talking more every day, and starting to put words together. Yesterday she was throwing shoes around and yelling "messy shoes!" Two of her favorite things: messes and shoes! Benjamin blames me for the shoe love. I'll blame him for the messes. :)
Another good find at the Carter's outlet was her Melissa and Doug cookie set. It keeps her occupied while I make dinner, and it's the last thing she wanted to play with before going to bed last night:
And the first thing she did this morning:
Sorry for the blurry pics- I took them all with my phone, which doesn't do so well with sunshine. I guess my phone also takes after me. :)

So that's what we're up to...