Two and a half years old!

Yesterday you turned two and half years old. Wahoo! Yes, you are still at an age where half years count. After all, we only recently stopped celebrating every single month of your life, so there's no rush to jump to an annual revelry schedule.... yet.

You saw Dr. Chen on Friday for your 2.5 year check-up.  She was majorly impressed with your language skills - full sentences and all that.  Apparently, that's something to get wowed over. You are ridiculously good at picking up new words these days and correcting mispronounced words too ("Ming-ah" became "Grandma" in about two seconds flat on Mother's Day and now you won't even accept the old name -- "No, it's Grandma!"). A thought occurred to me: you might want to slow it down a bit. Your parents are getting used to all this brilliance and, ya know, you don't want us to get jaded or have expectations that can't be met.  Just sayin'.

Speaking of Mother's Day, it was this past Sunday.  We had a good time at Uncle Mark & Aunt Melissa's house. Grandmom, Bubby, Pop-pop, Uncle Scott (formerly known as Uncle Knock) and Aunt Jaimi were all there. You and Caleb played in the tree house, ran around the yard, climbed through tents and played basketball in the driveway.

It must be nice to have a well-kept, flat, fenced yard with actual grass to play in. I really wish we had that at our house. Instead, we have this incredible steep yard, terraced in spots, with hills and valleys that have incredible ankle-breaking potential. It was all very quaint looking when we bought the house but it was never particularly toddler-friendly and many years of neglect haven't helped. We grow green stuff, but it's not grass. I'm not even sure if it's good enough to be called weeds. I was asked on Mother's Day why we don't have grass. Great question. I deferred it to Daddy. Taking care of the yard is daddy work! We also don't have a fence and you like to remind us of that regularly by running off. Awesome. 

In addition to the suckiness that is our yard, we have woods bordering one side of the property with a bunch of ivy that acts as a welcome mat to all the ticks. Hello, lyme-disease-carrying parasites, come on in, we'd love to have you! We had our first visitor about 2 weeks ago. It must have been on me because I found it in our bedroom right next to my laundry bag. Thankfully, no biting occurred.  However, our most recent guest found his way onto you... burrowed right into your head! I didn't come out easily. Nope.  It held on so tight that we pulled it apart in, like, 3 pieces. Can you imagine a creature that is so bloodthirsty (or determined?) it won't release it's grip even as it feels it's body being ripped in two??  It required lots of effort to fully remove the embedded head (yum!), but eventually we got it all out.  Hopefully it didn't transmit anything nasty to you.

It's enough to make me want to move to the city.