Jenny sent these to me in mid-November. I'm finally getting around to putting these up.

Here are some of the things that Ilea has been up to...

She tries to sing songs now. She's not very good. Her 2 hits are Twinkle
Star, where you ARE, Twinkle STAR, where you ARE, and Where is the mumble
mumble, where can BE?? should be Where, oh where has my little dog gone.
She can't seem to follow the tunes yet, and certainly doesn't know all the
words. But it's cute. She is also singing the Barney "I Love You" song and giving us a "hug and kiss" at the appropriate times. I ¥kipp¤ never thought I would say that I like the song but it is hard not to when Ilea is singing it.¤

She is also a neat freak. She picks fuzzies off people's clothes, and
recently has taken to cleaning the family room floor. She finds and picks
up one fuzzy, takes it to the trash, then comes back for more. If she keeps
it up I won't have to vacuum any more!

She still loves to read books, and is memorizing pages from her favorites.
She love Shoes, Shoes, Shoes, of course, and has 3 -4 different pages of
that one memorized. We recently got the story of Ping from the library.
She loves the part where the little boy falls in the river. At the
beginning of the book, the duck master calls the ducks by La La La Lei! But
Ilea gets excited when she sees the boy, so on that page she says La La La
BOY! ¥It actually says Whooeey! The boy fell in the river. Oohh-aaah!¤. She
often won't let us read because she wants to read herself. She is also
learning her letters, but not in the right order. At lunch she has a plate
that says "Peter Rabbit and Friends" along the rim. She starts out with A
then picks other letters from the alphabet at random, finally ending with
'Next time mumble with ME!" She now can say most of the alphabet except for L-N.

She's starting to pretend play more. She has some food and kitchen toys,
and loves to set the table and pretend to eat and drink. It's messy, but
fun. She does help clean up though. Also she likes the Magna Doodle drawing
toy. Her favorite thing is to have you outline her hand. Over and over.
She won't do yours, only you outline hers. Make a few on the page, then
erase them and start over. And over.

Lastly, it's been really cold up here. We put her in a blanket sleeper at
night, and she has a warm quilt. We always check her before we go to bed to
cover her up again. Last Sat morning we went in to get her, and there she
was, prancing around her crib buck naked! Not only had she taken the
blanket sleeper totally off, but her diaper too! She was in a great mood!
She didn't repeat the performance, but if she does, I'll have to start
safety pinning the zipper of her sleeper!