Shelby's World: 20 Months Old

Sorry for the lack of updates lately! We've been super busy on the weekends and time just slips away from us. Here's what has been going on lately in Shelby's world. She is changing so quickly these days, it's hard to even keep up anymore!

I have given up trying to write down all of her new words, because it seems like she learns a new word per day, or her pronunciation improves on a word she already knows. She will regularly repeat words we say, or string together two words to form a coherent thought, like "Mama bye bye" or "no no cat" (her favorite!) She understands that "bye bye" means saying bye bye and is also for when people are not present. She also regularly remembers names and people and can recall them from looking at a picture. She knows lots of animals and animal sounds. She understands it when we are asking her a question, although her favorite response is a sassy "NO!" no matter what we are asking her!
Her physical skills are developing drastically. She can run, jump off the ground with both feet and hang from a low playground bar with her feet off the ground. She also likes to lay on her tummy in the bath and "swim." It's very cute!
I don't know if it's the weather or shorter days, but she's been a sleepy head lately and slept in until 7:30 and 8:00 this weekend. It was so wonderful! We usually get up around 6:30 on weekdays and she usually wakes up when she hears us getting up and making noise. I was afraid we'd have a super early waker until the time change again, so this sleeping in has been a nice surprise. Let's keep it up, kid!
She is very cuddly and cute lately and is really into giving kisses and hugs. We love it, of course!
She is getting very independent and wants to do everything herself, like put on shoes. Of course, sometimes we don't have 30 minutes to spend trying to put on shoes before we go somewhere so sometimes it's a battle to get her dressed and out the door! She is fixated on shoes and socks and loves to put our shoes on our feet, on her feet and everything else.
She now always tells us when she has a poo. I think we will get a little toilet and start encouraging potty use soon.

Shelby got to go to her second Georgia game of the year last weekend when Georgia played Kentucky and we got a last-minute free ticket. Luckily it was an early game so it didn't cut into her nap time too much. She had a great time once again. Some of her favorite words (with our encouragement, of course) are football, Go Dawgs and Georgia. We are working on the "woof woof woof!"

We had a great Thanksgiving at her Papa's house and she even ate a little Thanksgiving food even though she had a regular lunch before her nap. We also checked out the Stone Mountain Christmas Village yesterday and she really loved all the lights on everything. Although for some reason you couldn't ride the train unless you bought some all-inclusive package, which included all these things she was too young to do. It was so heartbreaking, because she kept pointing to the train and saying "choo choo?" expectantly - how could you not sell us an individual ticket and make a little girl's day, Stone Mountain??

Here are some recent pictures of her. We are in the process of migrating our galleries to a new service, so I will just post a few pictures here until we are done with the transition. Click on any picture to enlarge it.