Weekend

We had a pretty uneventful weekend this weekend. Matti has been having a few, what I think are, nightmares almost every night this week. She also may be getting her two year molars. She has had several episodes of waking up in the middle of the night crying out for me. Most of the time she just needs to be tucked in and checked on.
Matti is constantly learning new words every day. Her most recent are Pumpkin and Elephant of course Elephant sounds more like El phant and Pumpkin sounds like Pukin. It is too cute.
We took her to play at the park this weekend in our neighborhood which is usually empty, but this weekend there were a lot of children there. Most of them were around Matti's age. I was worried about her getting pushed around, but found that I had a different problem. She was pushing the other kids around telling all the other children "My Slide", "My turn", MY EVERYTHING. She just jumped right in front of other kids and did her own thing pretty much pushing them to the side. I completely felt out of my element and was not sure what I should do. I first tried to tell Matti that this was Every ones playground and that she needed to take turns, pointing out to her how she must share. Of course in went in one ear and right out the other. I threatened that if she did not play nice we would have to go home. Once I told her that every time a child would come around she would look at them and say "play nice". She eventually got the idea, well sort of. I just had to hold my breath and also I caught myself giggling under my breath at how darn bossy she was. I just shook my head.
We ran into one little girl who looked similar to her cousin Emma. She followed the little girl around and kept trying to talk to her calling her Emma. I thought it was sweet.
She has been a perfect angel here lately. Tantrums right now are few and far between, but I know that this will change again probably over the next few weeks.
We have been playing with play dough, I cut out pumpkins out of construction paper for her to decorate and we put them on the refrigerator, she loves Tinker toys (only under supervision) and she loves to pretend she is cooking for us. Grandma Marion gave me a huge bag of zippers and I have found her several times sitting in the floor with the bag of zippers pulling one by one out and sorting the colors into categories. She is really getting good at recognizing her colors esp. yellow, brown, orange, red, green, purple, blue, black, and white. It was pretty cool watching her sort and match colors together.
She also loves for me to take her finger and court items in books. She likes to pretend to count using my finger. I have made a game out of it. She is starting to love certain books at night before bed. It is like a ritual.
Her bedtime routine is so routine that Saturday night we decided to let her stay up a little later than normal, but decided against a bath since it was so late. She was all out of sorts. We put on her pajamas and read books and then she took off into the bathroom and wanted to take a bath. I saw first hand how a routine is beneficial for bedtime.
I will post some pictures of the park. She is really growing up so fast I am amazed every day at the things she can do...