Kalira Teal is 2 1/2!

Last Tuesday, we surprised Kali by letting her know that it was her 2 1/2 birthday.  She was thrilled!  She kept asking "It's my birdday??" When we explained "half birthday" she tried to say it, but just ended up at Birrday again.  It'll do.  Speaking of her verbal skills, she's killing it on sentences and much more advanced thoughts lately, but we're also noticing the difference between her and Sabrina at this age.  While Sabrina had an adorable "lellow" phase, she said almost everything exactly right.  I think we took it for granted.  Kali says many things with much more of her own "twist" than Sabrina ever did.  Her sister is "Sabweena," oatmeal is a very long word "ooooAAAtttmeal," breakfast is sometimes still indecipherable (in fact Brent came up one morning to ask what she was talking about and we finally settled on breakfast) but it's something like "bweaakist," and our favorite is still when she's explaining where something is, it's usually "ober der."  She is extremely polite most of the time and almost always says "Thank you for cooking" whenever we sit down to eat, or "thank you for opening that for me, Mommy" or even "thank you for saying 'you're welcome' Mama."  Everything needs to happen "in two minutes" these days - whether that's leaving for school in the morning, not playing with her toys anymore, or going pee on the potty (we learned to ignore her request for 2 minutes in that situation).  And speaking of peeing on the potty, she's had a breakthrough week!  We started sending her to school in underwear last Tuesday (coincidentally on her half-birthday...easy to remember for us) and she's only had a handful of accidents - and that includes no diapers during naptime.  She's getting it!  We've noticed a big change recently and she even asked to get out of the bathtub tonight to go pee in the potty.  Huge strides there!

We tucked away a few presents at Christmas when we could see that she'd gotten enough already, and we're so glad we did because it was very fun for her to open two gifts that night.  She got a Little Mermaid Duplo set from Aunt Deed and a latch board puzzle.  She pulls us downstairs regularly now asking us to "go play with my mermaid blocks."  Thanks for the set, Deed!

Here's a photo of her opening the gifts and up top are a few of her being goofy in the bath last week.

Happy half-birthday you sweet, funny, challenging, strong-willed little lady.