As much as Madeline loves to be on the iPad, she loves to be outside even more and will drop everything just for the chance to go outside to run around and play. She loves to go for walks and will usually end up running. She is so fast and I have to run just to keep up with her. I know she is going to be a runner. She also loves to jump on the trampoline. She can jump up and down on the ground pretty well now, which makes jumping on the trampoline even more fun. Madeline loves to play at the park and will almost exclusively go down the slide the entire time. She loves walking up the stairs and going down the slide all by herself. She is not to keen about the swing.
Madeline still sucks her thumb and does it more now than she did when she was younger. I think it has become her go to comfort mechanism. She usually will only suck her thumb when she has her blanket with her.
Madeline is like a sponge…she soaks up everything around her. That also means that she says pretty much anything she hears. That has been a good and a bad thing. She has been known to copy a few things after hearing her siblings say: Shut up, Oh my gosh, and What the heck. The only way to get her to stop repeating those phrases is to distract her with a more suitable phrase for her age. Yikes. On the flipside, Madeline does say some pretty cute things. When she gets up, she will say, “I wake up.” When she is excited about something she will say, “I like it.”
Madeline played in the snow for the first time this month. She has walked in the snow before but this was actually the first time that she play in it. We went for a walk around the neighborhood and then played in the backyard. She loved it when I made her snowballs to throw at me. That seemed to make her giggle. Playing in the snow was fun but what was even better was drinking hot chocolate with whipping cream. Madeline loved her first hot chocolate drink. I only filled up her mug halfway and she drank that so fast and wanted more. This girls loves chocolate.
One of Madeline’s other firsts this month was going to the Aquarium in Atlanta. She LOVED watching the fish in the big tank but got a little nervous the first time she saw the big sting rays and the big whale sharks. As soon as we pointed out that the whale shark looked like Destiny from the Dori movie, she became so excited and stood at the tank until Destiny came back around. From that point on she wasn’t interested in anything other than seeing her friend Destiny swim in the big tank.
Madeline also got to enjoy the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo for the first time. She loved seeing the giraffe but wasn’t too thrilled about getting up close to feed them. She also loved the elephants, tiger, bear, and surprisingly, the turkey. We saw lots of other animals but these were her favorites.