more helping - and a new word

Maren's vocabulary is increasing by leaps and bounds every day. Until the last week or so, she's been saying these words:

dada (usually shouted, "DA!")
mama
mow (mole) (okay, that's an odd one, but she likes to pinch the mole on mommy's neck while nursing)
yeah
no
ba (ball)
lo (hello)

But in the last two weeks, she's added quite a few more:
atsahhh (outside)
bu (bus)
maow (meow)
cack cack (quack)
bye
doh (door)
wawa (water)
mo (more, accompanied by frantic and/or forceful signing of same)
miw (milk)






And she still loves to help around the house, especially with the dishwasher. Dad has helped her perfect her dishwasher skills, which are pretty good for a 17-month old. (You should see her empty the washing machine. Seriously. She's pretty good.)



In other news, we discovered this week that dry-erase pen comes off faces pretty easily. So that's good to know.

the big bathtub

I promised Maren (not that she knows this yet) that I would not post bathtub pictures on the blog because, you know, that might be embarrassing later in life. Because who wants naked photos of themselves in a bathtub all over the internet? Nobody, that's who.

But tonight was her first night in the big bathtub - after outgrowing the inflatable one she has adored for months - and we managed to take a few photos. And some of them are not that embarrassing (we hope).

maren helps with the trash

Maren is becoming very helpful these days. She likes to help with the dishwasher: primarily by emptying all the dishes you are trying to put in it, but she means well. She is very good at putting shoes in the closet (and even better at taking shoes out of the closet and leaving them all over the house). She really loves to help with the diapers by putting all the clean diapers in the dirty diaper pail. And, just recently, her dad taught her to help on trash day. Like this:




See? Helpful.