Have I mentioned MY crush?

Longing to see a friend in "Hi-da-ho"

I promise Chris and I haven't brought the subject up once! She is still enamored. "I go to Ryan's house!", "Yes we saw Ryan in Idaho", "Who else did we see?", "I saw Gram-Grams, and Dennis, and Dresia..." The girl has a good memory!
She still talks about him almost daily. I love the sweet innocence of it! She is also showing her affection more and more to those she loves here, hugging friends on a whim, kissing her daddy, climbing into my lap for a cuddle. Today she kept grabbing the end of my braid and rubbing it on her face, even kissing it. I can see why, she has held that hair in Mama's embrace since she was old enough to wrap her tiny fingers around it. It was her "lovee". It is so amazing to watch her learn how to love. And being the recipient of it is beyond words! They say it only gets better but how can it? I'll have to wait and see. ;-)

I know...It's been a while...

Well I don't know if anyone will even notice that I have updated this blog or not but the time has come for me to face my fears and POST! I say fears because I guess I never realized the expectations that I had set up for myself to have the perfect blog. Shortly after my last post, my sweet aunt passed away and I was determined to write something clever in honor of her. In my failure to get that put together I just kept putting it off, and off, and off....until... Suddenly here we are almost two years later! I will let that go for now, but perhaps in the future I will tell you about how I miss her gentle spirit and genuine laugh.




The reason I decided to write something now is due to the latest achievement in my ever surprising little daughter's life. Seeing how the last few posts were about her eagerness to jump ahead of the expected developmental milestones, I want to tell you of her latest feats. Just to catch you up on the last year and a half, not only did she crawl at six months but she walked at 8 1/2 months, potty trained herself by 20 months and probably now thinks she's ready for kindergarten! But her latest thing is cracking us up even more! She has her first crush!!! When we went to Boise two weekends ago we visited our friends, the Mahoneys. Their oldest boy is none other than Ryan who I started watching at the age of 2 months old when I lived in Boise. Now he is eight (hard to believe!) Lyssa played with Ryan and his younger brother Michael for an hour or two and apparently that was enough. We got home and several days went by without any of us mentioning a thing... Then one day she said out of the blue, "I love Ryan!". (I'm not talking about a statement of fact, I'm talking about that way you say you love someone with your eyes twinkling, your head tilted, and your voice sighing the last half of their name." I just thought how cute it was that she remembered him, but that was only the beginning. Several times a day she asks to look at the pictures of him we took on our trip, giggling and dancing when she sees them. Not a day has gone by that she hasn't sighed and said, "Mommy, I love Ryan!". We just smile and say who else do you love? Sometimes we're on the list sometimes it's just "Gamma", "Boppa", and Maddo.