Relationships

After all the holiday special events and visits, Molly has started to make connections about relationships. "Grammy and Bompy are Beth's parents!" she said to us this week. Where does she come up with this stuff? She has figured out that Mama's name is Beth and Daddy is Dave (although she sometimes calls him Thomas Dave). It's so interesting to watch her reach that next level of understanding... Mama and Daddy have parents too and it's those people that she knows as grandparents. Molly started referring to Jimmy and Annie as her cousins this week too... we're so glad she recognizes them as super special friends!

On the topic of relationships, Molly has started to work out cause and effect. Warning! This gets a little gross... Molly had a nice visit to the potty yesterday. We had just come back from breakfast with our friends Shantie and Amilia... Molly said, "I think the sausage makes poopy and the bacon makes tinkle." Hmmm... we're not sure how we're going to test that hypothesis. Unfortunately, Molly came down with a tummy bug tonight. She had similar cause and effect ideas involving boogers and upchucking!

What a fun age and stage! What will she figure out next?

One of Molly's Christmas gifts was a fish. We thought it would be a fun little responsibility for her to feed a little pet each day. Monday, we picked out a shiny blue Betta and Molly named him Twinkle.

Twinkle's "release" party!

We are SO excited about Molly's train set. We've already logged quite a few hours of fun on the Boven railroad.

Molly's pink eye kept us from hanging out with friends for New Year's Eve, so we had our own little party. Here's the happy family in our party hats.

Homemade New Year's ice cream... this time it was chocolate raspberry. YUM!

Most of Tuesday morning was spent watching the Rose Bowl parade. Molly was really into the floats. Later in the week, she kept asking to watch "that float show" again!

We're introducing Molly to the world of board games. Her High Five magazine comes with games for tots and this Chinese New Year one is right up her alley. So far, we're keeping the competition pretty low key, but when we get close to seeing some of our old game buddies and their kids, we'll have to get Molly to turn up the aggression. Watch out, Lucy Hatch and VanOpstal boys.

This weekend we took down the tree, so we put up some snowflakes in place of Christmas decorations. Molly's pretty talented with snowflake painting.

Chromatography snowflakes!

Molly was really excited to measure her belly... I'm not sure why... maybe some kind of New Year's resolution!