So instead of just writing out Breanne’s birthday stats, I thought I’d have her share them with you. I figured you might like to hear her talk, and she definitely loves to take videos, so… here is a 5 minute video of her answering my questions:

Me!! And I made it myself! I’m pretty ridiculously proud of it, sorry.

The exterior is corduroy, for two reasons. One, I love corduroy, and two, it’s so durable! You’re supposed to use a home decor weight fabric of some sort, but most of those are dry clean only, which just doesn’t scream diaper bag, to me. So thus, the washer and dryer friendly corduroy.

It has an outside pocket for papers and such,

an inside pocket divided into three sections, meant to carry three sippy cups or bottles, or other snacks,

and an inside pocket for my keys, phone, wallet, and whatever else.

I’ve been wanting a bigger and nicer diaper bag for a while now, but just couldn’t find anything I loved, and everything was so expensive! So, I finally got up the nerve to make one myself. I got inspiration from this tutorial, and this tutorial, but ended up making it how I wanted it. I still need to sew on another piece of velcro, but because I broke my sewing machine needle (first time for everything, right?), it will have to wait. But I am excited, and I love it. And, it cost me less than $20! (and one sewing machine needle…) Pretty great.

Name: Janey Renae

Age: Two

Height: 32 inches

Weight: 22 lbs

–Favorites–

These are all answers she gave me.

Color: Red/Pink (every time I ask, she says one of those two, but goes back and forth on them).

Animal: Dog (JoJo especially)

Food: Pancakes

Movies: Boots… Dora!

Books: Alella baby books (the princess board books–alella is like the latter half of Cinderella…)

Song: Patty Cake

Past time: Babies! (She LOVES to play with her baby dolls, especially her new ones).

Favorite Birthday Present: Babies!

Best Friend: Breanne

A few I’d like to answer–

Best Feature: Her ability to brush things off–if she gets hurt, she just wants me to acknowledge it most of the time, and then she’s fine. If someone takes her toy, she’s usually happy as long as they give her something else. If she takes someone else’s toy, she’s really good about giving it back, if I ask her to.

Funniest things said by Janey lately: She says “Yep” and “Nope!” instead of yes and no, which I think is hilarious. She’s also starting to put words together into pretty decent sentences. Last night, after her cousin Claire dumped an entire deck of Uno cards on the floor, she looked at the cards, and said “Claire… cards… mess!”–I love it.

Biggest accomplishments in the last year: Lots of motor development, and her speech development. She is a crazy climbing/running/almost jumping child, and loves to wrestle, go for rides on your back, and just play in general. That being said, she also insists on holding my hand to go down our front stairs, and for much of the time we spend while walking outside. Also in the last few months, her speech has really taken off. She’s gone from just a few words to more than I can count, and her speech is much more understandable than Breanne’s was at her age. I love that she is able to communicate her needs, wants, concerns and issues to me. When she cries, she can tell me why. However, she isn’t always reliable–if she doesn’t understand your question, she’ll still usually answer, whether it’s true or not.

Despite how crazy Janey can be, and her lack of desire to listen to me sometimes, I seriously love this little girl. She has so much energy and spirit for life, and is pretty much fearless (the one exception being the monsters she and Breanne were pretending to run away from the other day–so funny!). It’s been so fun to watch her grow into her own little being over the last year, and I love that she can hold her own against Breanne. Over the last few weeks, they’ve become such wonderful playmates, and are willing to spend most of their time together. Recently they’ve been playing vacation… they pack their bags, take a trip to my bedroom, hang up their clothes (play dresses), put their shoes away (in my shoebox), and pretend to watch tv in my bed (there is no tv in my bedroom, but there was one in their bedroom in the hotel in NH). It cracks me up every time I hear them talking about what they want to do on their trip. And don’t even fight that much–it’s been so nice to have them getting along so well as we’ve all been adjusting to being back at home again, with a new baby besides. Janey is such an amiable little girl, I love having her around. Two years ago I was terrified about making the transition from one child to two. Now I can’t imagine a life without my sweet girl Janey.

So I just posted about a million new things below, so don’t miss them. I’ve had a ton of pictures just waiting to be blogged, and today I finally found the time and energy to doing it (single bonus to Cory being sick–he’s home, and available to hold the baby so I can do stuff). I hope you enjoy them, and sorry for the bombardment today. But not really, because now I’m mostly caught up, at least photo-post wise. I still need to write a bunch of stories and things down too, though, so be watching for those. Thanks for reading (and for commenting, we all know how much comments are loved, right?).

So we currently only have one trike, and two kids who like to ride it (though neither of them are particularly great at it). Solution?

Taking turns riding and pushing. Janey likes pushing probably more than riding (but they did still take turns doing each thing… Janey just needed help steering, too, so I couldn’t snap a picture).

So sometimes the girls like to show me their “moves.” Janey’s mostly consist of somersaults… kind of. Breanne’s used to be the same way, but thanks to her gymnastics class, she now knows about tabletops, pikes, and rolls. I was taking pictures of both girls doing their moves, but suddenly it all went wrong:

I love that they’re learning to really play together and enjoy one another, and sometimes that they even have fun wrestling. And yes, Janey is definitely the instigator. Most of the time.

Sometimes (all the time?) the girls just want me to take their pictures. And sometimes (all the time?) I’m pretty happy to oblige them. I love living in the digital age.

PS. Sorry about Janey’s boogers. I would love for her not to have them anymore.

So this last Sunday, Janey turned the big ol’ 2! A post of favorite things about her and what she’s doing is coming, but for right now, I just wanted to share a few more photos.

What present opening looks like at our house:

This does NOT even do her justice for how cute she was that day, but I didn’t get a better picture, sadly:

The cake I made for her (also forgot to take a before picture… sheesh):

And again, just an attempt to show how cute she looked… but still doesn’t do her justice:

Oh how I love this little girl.

So every now and then we do some sort of new craft. Both the girls really love art time, but now that Janey’s participating, I have to be more careful about what they do (I like low-supervision, low-mess crafts). I finally decided to let her do something with glue the other day, and she did great! We made snowmen out of cotton balls on paper–I drew one for Janey and let her put on the cotton balls, Breanne did hers completely by herself.

I think if I do this again, I might do it on paper plates, and use chocolate syrup as the glue and use marshmallows for the snowmen… yummy! And if it’s going to be messy, it might as well be yummy.