March and 2 year old

Juliana has been very busy (per usual) the past month! She loves to color with pens (which is not a good thing for her clothes and hands, but we're working on making sure the pens are clicked off when she doesn't have paper in front of her, or she's walking around). She focuses on making small marks on paper, and typically says she's written "Juliana" or "Momma" or "Dadda".

 She picks her own styles, and takes care of her baby dolls every chance she gets.

She is sleeping much better in her bed, even asking to lay down in her bed instead of cuddling with Mommy or Daddy in the twin bed. She is thrilled with her pillow, and insists on sleeping with 3 blankets, even though it causes her to sweat buckets every night. She requires that someone "pat" her until she falls asleep at night, and she has lullabies that play for a few hours on the iPod. I agonized over the transition from white noise all night (from the time she was quite little) to lullabies all night, to lullabies only when going to sleep and sometimes when she woke up in the morning. Turns out it was all for naught since she pretty consistently sleeps through the noise of Brian's truck leaving for work in the morning and the chirping of birds at first light.

 She wants to do everything that we do, including carrying Elmo in the backpack even though it is way too big for her.

 She has so many baby dolls and yet she's still able to keep them straight and consistently picks favorites.

One weekend I decided it would be a fun activity to made blueberry sweet rolls from scratch. Juliana was thrilled to help, dumping the measured flour and other ingredients into the bowl, and stirring. Daddy came to help us knead and roll out the dough.

This baby doll she has named Areya (ah-ray-uh), which is the name of a baby at day care, and it is one of her favorites. Areya has even gone to day care a couple of days. One afternoon when I was picking Juliana up, Connor was pushing a dump truck around and Juliana was chasing after putting Areya into the bed of the truck. Here she is feeding Areya peas.

Little prissy, all dressed up complete with white gloves and pink purse.

Weekend naps tend to be long with Juliana not wanting to wake up.

 Juliana eats great, and continues to surprise me with what she enjoys. This night it was pork roast with gravy and roasted vegetables. She ate 3 platefuls of "grabbies".

Juliana is quite popular at school and was featured in the monthly newsletter (below). The teachers all say she is so funny and they're trying to listen to things the other kids say to be featured, but they think it'll all be her. She also clutched her chest and said that her heart was broken (maybe a reference to Frozen?). One time she was crying and the teacher asked her why she was crying and Juliana said "I don't know!", which the teacher said sounded like something her 16 year old daughter would say.

 I've worked on a few craft projects when I get a chance like this baby sweater for a post-doc in our lab who's expecting a boy in August.

 Our red burlap holiday wreath had faded horribly and started to smell (natural process of burlap breaking down), so we made a trip to JoAnn Fabrics to get the supplies for this hydrangea wreath.

For Juliana's birthday we had family come up and we spent Saturday morning at the Children's Museum.

 After lunch, and an attempt at a nap (she got brief periods of sleep in the van while we travelled to and from Pittsburgh, Juliana unwrapped her gifts and got to enjoy lots of new books, and clothes.

 Lolli made her birthday cake which was a small teddy bear with a tutu. Juliana used her fingers to carefully scrape off all of the icing versus actually eating the cake... Oh well. But she was so excited. Friday, I took mini-cupcakes into school for her to share with her classmates, and she threw such a tantrum over wanting to have one every time she saw it. Apparently she had one for breakfast at school and another one at snack time. And they all sang Happy Birthday to her over and over and over again. She was thrilled.