Welcome Tuesdaymom and A-time-to-live! I will enjoy your updates!
We are experiencing just some plain growing up. I feel like every year at this time DD transforms overnight. At 6 months, she started crawling and signing and talking and doing all these tricks. At 18 months, she started talking in paragraphs overnight, learned her letters, shapes, colors, and numbers.
Now at 2.5 she has just become this little kid. I dare you to find any toddler in her. She is doing puzzles, and throwing balls hard, and counting her fingers. She finds loopholes in my wordings. She plays around with language to get out of things. She has imaginary monsters she plays tag with. She is going to "preschool" and loving it. She actually thinks about others before herself...most of the time.
She has also become much more interested in print. Out of the blue she began to show understanding of how letters make up words and words sentences, and that you read them from left to right and stop at the periods. She can sound out whole CVC words, and blend the sounds into words. There is this awareness that wasn't there before as well as a desire to want to figure it all out. Every now and again I will catch her reading a word somewhere, and I just wonder if she is actually doing it. It seems I am constantly telling myself she inferred rather than read. Anyway, it is a start, and I am encouraged at how chill it is. It is nice to know she has many of those pre-reading skills down pat. But, I cannot say that she is in any way obsessed with this.
I would say that she is a bit obsessed with time. She has exhausted all the birthdays I know. I have even made up some for her toys. She was captivated by Groundhog day and the implications of the rodent's reaction. Her new thing is to ask "how long until...?" questions. She is very pacified by this. This morning she woke up at 6am and she asked me how long until morning. I told her 2 hours, and she was like "ok," and lied back down. I cannot adequately explain how much 'time' comes up in our day. And, it is amazing how much she seems to understand numbers in the context of time, but not much else. For example, she certainly knows all her ordinal and cardinal numbers up until the 31. And, she knows 2 hours is more than 5 minutes. But, the only thing she wants to count is her fingers (which is really cute, because she is only now able to hold up 1,2,3,4 fingers at a time.)
She shocked me the other day by spurting out huge chunks of the Lords Prayer, so I taught her most of that on the way home from my sister's the other day. (It was just like how she learned The Pledge of Allegiance.) It was just...shocking. She has such an aural memory. She also repeats lyrics and audio books about 3 seconds after she hears them. Isn't that weird? She is basically a 3 second delay and she does it really well. They best is when we just turn on the radio. I does not seem compulsive, though.
What is compulsive? Her nose picking. She seems to stick her fingers in her nose or mouth or back and forth whenever she gets stressed, bored, or deep in thought. It is disgusting. I am at my wits' end.
Also, the incessant "why...?" questions are driving me up the wall.
. His referees wrote wonderful letters on his behalf. Now it's a matter of waiting and hoping. 
Thankfully DH was already in the middle of telling them a story and I was able to distract her by asking her to get a baby doll instead. But DD's definitely the type to come out with a lot of randomness (like in the elevator when it apparently seemed like a good time to ask me if I'm wearing big girl panties
like her)
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