18 months already

Shannon went to NURSERY on Sunday!

Her hair is long enough now to sport the Bam-Bam ponytail...

She gets giddy playing at the park while we wait for Cole/Whitney's ball practices (4 days/week!)

At the park, she'll go into this "clubhouse" and say her prayers at the table. It cracks me up!

She's taken care of business on the potty 3 times now. I couldn't resist her pleas the other day for her blanket and binky.

I really think she thinks she's hiding when she closes her eyes really tight like this. It's hilarious to her for some reason.

When things are quiet around the house, I can usually find her up here in Cole's closet enjoying the books off the second shelf:

One of her favorite things to do is get in the driver's side of the car and play with the buttons and steering wheel. This picture below was back in January when I found Annie & Shannon eating leftover pizza from a take-out box we had left in the car the night before! (YUCK!)

But the reason I added this little detail about Shannon in this update is because I had to call 911 last week because she & my keys got locked in the van while the van was outside in the driveway. I was outside talking with my friend while she was picking up her daughter from my house, and I mindlessly shut the door to my car just as Whitney was running to tell me that Shannon had locked the doors from the inside. Doh!!!

It was a long 5 minutes of coaching Shannon to push the buttons to unlock and watching her little face turn red b/c it was warm out. Thankfully she wasn't showing any signs of distress b/c she was walking around the car, pushing all the buttons and having a blast. Literally about 20 seconds before the emergency vehicles showed up, Shannon picked up my keys and started pushing the buttons on it, and she unlocked the car. I felt embarrassed on one hand for having the emergency guys rush out to help me, but relieved that Shannon wasn't in any danger.


She's become our little ninja puzzle solver. Check out the video below if you want to see her in action, but first a few explanations:
1) I added song to the video because (as I've seen my creative friend Camille do...) life just looks more fun when music is playing in the background.
2) In the middle of Shannon's puzzle work, Whitney takes a plastic knife to Shannon's hair, so I wanted to have some music to cover up the insanity there.
3) The song is from the Beatles, and (as I learned at our family reunion in December), it's my nephew's favorite song because his grandpa sings it to him at night. It's become one of our family favorites too. Thanks Carson & Danica!
Enjoy: