As you can see, Kira was a darn cute penguin for Halloween this year. We went over to our friends place, they have their house all decked out for halloween, it was amazing! I wish we had taken photos of the place - lots of people on the street were! Kira wasn't overly thrilled with the whole concept of halloween this year. She was clinging to Jon and I like her life depended on it. After a short while she warmed up a little and went up and down the stairs of the house most of the night. I have accepted now that she doesn't like chocolate (honestly, is she even my kid??) but it appears that she has some love for the salty; she devoured a small bag of chips yesterday and then a small bag of cheezies today! That said, she'd still take fruit over the junk and I guess I'll be ok with that.

Jon took Kira in for her 18 month vaccinations last week, she did very well. She apparently barely cried and was happy as anything for the rest of the day. Just when I was thinking how wonderful it was that the shots were finally over, the doctor tells us to come back next week for her H1N1 vaccination. D'oh. Oh well, it's for her own good, we'd be very upset if she got sick and we could have prevented it. And yes, I'll be getting mine then too - the doctor didn't give me a choice either. I'm curious to find out of everyone will be taking their kids for the shots...

Happy Halloween!

Halloween 2008

Halloween 2009

She's started to close her eyes in anticipation of the flash...

More Pictures!

Mmmmm, Nutella

Practicing her tunnel that she learned in gymnastics class

Kira continues to grow and change into a little girl. She is starting to pull temper tantrums (joy), is beginning to put 2 words together (bye mama, oh yeah, etc) and is speaking in baby talk sentences. Overall, she's a pretty happy go lucky kid, we are just enjoying the ride. This stage in her life is a lot of fun. Tuesday, Jon will be taking her for her 18 month shots...I've managed to get out of this one tee hee. I'm sure that they will both do just fine, thankfully these are the last shots until she is in school. Next weekend is Halloween, I'll be taking Kira out to Grandma Tracy's house so that she can go trick or treating at a couple of family friends houses, she'll be dressed up as a Penguin. Hopefully this years costume will go over better than last years...

Peez

Happy belated Thanksgiving! Hope that everyone had a great long weekend. We were able to host our first Thanksgiving dinner this year since we finally got our first dining set! It still seems odd that after all these years, we never had a proper table and chairs to eat at. Anyhow, we had my Mom, Step-Dad, Step-Brother, Brother, and 2 sisters in law over for dinner, Kira had a blast with all the company, obviously they were all here to see her only! Here's a photo of Uncle Jeffy playing with Kira at her little table...

Way to drink your wine while colouring...

Kira has been doing very well, she is still battling a cough and runny nose, she has been for about a month now. Poor little thing. Doesn't seem to be bothering her though. She will usually fall right back to sleep at night if she wakes up with a coughing fit.

She has started to mimic our every move now too, and while she can't always say what she wants, she has gotten very good at telling us what she wants. While I was away last week, Jon was trying to get Kira off the bottle, so he was giving her milk in a sippy cup - she did not like that one bit. She kept pushing the sippy cup away with an aggressive head shake, then she'd get up and march to the sink (where the bottles were drying) and point to the bottles! This continued all week, she actually didn't have any milk at home all week because Jon refused to give her a bottle and she refused to take anything but a bottle. Of course, I gave her the bottle when I got home on Saturday. I'm so weak. She's added a couple more words now too, including meow, hello ("o"), and good bye.

Here are a couple more pictures of Kira. Jon found my camera, so I'll start taking some videos of Kira again and get them up so you can see her saying please (peez).

Some pictures from the new place

Kira loves to help clean, here she is with the swifer dusting the floor.

...and helping to turn on the washing machine

Looking so angelic here...

...and like a little devil here.
She loves to flash her belly, I don't know why, but it's pretty darn funny.

This week Kira has been fighting a pretty nasty cold. She's been coughing a lot and is struggling to sleep properly. She seems to be beating it now, we kept her out of gymnastics and swimming this week to help her recover quicker.

She is starting to get much better with her abc's. Sure, it's still not really easy to understand what she's saying, but she can pronounce a few more letters now - like A, D, E, O etc. She also has started to say "Elaine", which is the name of the lady at daycare.

This week I will be heading to California without Jon and Kira. I am excited to be going away, but am sad that I'll be going without them. That said, I know that they are going to have so much fun. Kira gets so excited when Jon gets home from work and always has so much fun with him. This week he taught her how to flop onto her pillow, so the two of them will sit on the bed, then Jon will count to three, and they both dive face first onto the pillows. It's hilarious.

The past couple of weeks have been quite eventful. Kira returned to her gymnastics, got sick, started saying "please", and started her swim lessons.

She still loves going to her gymnastics every Saturday morning with Daddy. She gets to sing and run around without fear of hurting herself. She is getting better at walking across the balance beam, and jumping by herself. It's also helping to boost her social interaction with other kids.

Thursday night we drove out to Maple Ridge to go celebrate my Uncle's 70th birthday. I picked up Kira at daycare and we began the long trek out to Maple Ridge. I'm not certain as to what happened exactly, but all of a sudden Kira began to "expel" everything that she had eaten. After a quick clean up, I determined that she was indeed fine and that she had likely just gulped too much water too quickly. We were just crossing the new Golden Ears bridge when the rest of the dinner made its way out. It was horrible, the poor kid just sat there while I struggled to figure out where I was and how the quickly get to my cousin's place. Thankfully my Aunt met us in the driveway and kindly cleaned up the car while I ran Kira up to the bath. Kira was totally fine after that, she ate more dinner and played with her cousins all night, and has been fine since. I hope that she isn't developing car sickness...

Today, Kira had her first swimming lesson. I had been dragging my feet in signing her up because everytime she goes near a pool she screams and cries, but I don't want her to turn out like me (who can't swim much at all and has developed a fear of swimming), so I dragged her out there - kicking and screaming - through her first swim lesson. She calmed down when there was singing and liked moving her free arm around in the water (the other was tightly wrapped around the back of my neck). We are going to keep taking her there, I'm hopeful that in a few weeks she'll be very comfortable there. I'm going to try to take her to drop-in swimming on Friday so that come Sunday she's got that one extra trip under her belt, and hopefully she won't disrupt everyone else.

Finally, Kira has started to say the word that Jon and I have been waiting for - Please. Of course, she says "peez", but whatever, it's close enough. It only took her about a day to realize that saying "peez" would get her most anything (within reason). She uses it a lot now, even with her grandparents. Now we just have to get her saying thank you...