Happy birthday Laila!

Laila is two now!

sashagee really loves themed birthdays, and online she found an invitation for a "groovy twos" birthday, so she got a bunch of peace and flower themed stickers, balloons, and garlands and got the house all decorated. We were originally going to hold it in a park by the beach, but the weather report kept calling for thunderstorms and changing when in the day they were going to be, so to be cautious we moved it to our house. The weather turned out fine, if a bit cold, but we had plenty of room for people so it all worked out.

Laila had a great time:

Twinsies!

We didn't have any birthday candles, but we did have a leftover Ḥanukah candle, so we used that. Laila doesn't have a grasp of blowing out candles yet but she knows what they are since we light Shabbat candles every Friday night.

The party was mostly adults but someone else we originally met at the Mishkan baby group came with her older son and her daughter Laila's age. Laila and her played together with the Sesame Street toys that Laila got--Laila's favorite is the Count; she can already say "Two! Ah ha ha!"--and the other girl's favorite is Elmo, though she also uses Elmo to mean "a Sesame Street character." That meant they spent a while trading characters back and forth and having a great time. I was a bit more worried about the older boy since he was the only person there his age, but he turned out fine. We have a ball pit that's also full of stuffed animals and he immediately went over there and just melded into the ball pit. Even with around twenty adults milling around he was doing fine.

Laila had a great time running around, checking out her presents, eating tacos while sitting on her grandmother's lap, and seeing everyone.

In Laila news, she's using more words. Just today she was in the bathroom and looked at the bath and said "Not now?" and when sashagee confirmed that it wasn't bath time she ran away laughing--sashagee thinks she's happy she was understood. Yesterday I took her to the park and she ran around for fifteen minutes and then decided she had enough--she walked over to the park gate and said, "Go. Go. Gooooooo" and we left. She's started finding foods that she likes and foods that she doesn't like. She's a huge fan of meat and bread, and likes blueberries and bananas. She likes broccoli and cucumbers too but not as much, so I spend some time feeding them to her. Her latest thing is that she's decided she doesn't like sitting down in her chair for meals anymore, she wants to sit on our laps. It makes it much more difficult to eat meals but we know that there'll be a day when she doesn't want to sit in our laps at all anymore, so we let her sit there now. She decided that's what she wants to do one day, and some day she'll change her mind.

In addition to the other toddler at the party, Laila played with a kid at the park! Little kids are so funny when they're playing since they don't really know how to interact with each other, but there was a little boy who wanted Laila to draw on the slide with chalk, so she did that for a bit. Then she wandered off and the boy was obviously sad she left, but he couldn't talk yet, so he kind of yelled incoherently at her and Laila was clearly like "I don't understand you" and wandered away. Even when he got her attention and handed her a chalk again, she held onto it for a moment, gave it back, and then left. Social skill are skills--they need to be learned.

I'll need to change the tag. She's not a baby anymore!