I haven’t posted much about Kayleigh recently, but she is has been growing in leaps and bounds.

Note: Paul has always called Abby "Short Stuff," so naturally, Kayleigh is "Shorter Stuff," hence the title of the post.

People are noticing that she is talking and understanding a lot more. She is so busy building her vocabulary, though, and not focusing on making sure she says each word correctly. From her intonation, context, and choice of sounds you can understand her pretty well, but it’s still frustrating (and funny) to hear her refer to socks as “gocks”, sippie cups as “bippie bop”. And, yes, most of her words seem to start with “G” or “B”. So, although she can even say short sentences, like “There you go, Abby,” they come out as “Gair you go, Babby.”

It’s neat to hear her mixing Chinese and English, but with her lazy focus, we sometimes get things like “nilk” as she tries to combine “nai” (Mandarin for milk) and its English equivalent. We do consider all of these minor issues because when we get her to concentrate, she can say pronounce all of these sounds/words just fine.

Last note about her language development that is really cute to witness is that she currently walks around the house, muttering words that she feels are related. For example: “Goggy (doggy), puppy, go-go (Mandarin for dog), arf!, woof!”, “Hoss (horse), neigh!”, “Mao (Mandarin for cat), cat, meeeeoooowwww!, Belle-Belle (name of one of our cats).”

Kayleigh can walk up and down stairs now, holding onto the rails or one of our hands. She is trying very hard to learn how to jump, but she bops around and dances quite a bit. Watching Abby do gymnastics, she has taught herself to do a very good forward roll. Seeing that, we tried enrolling her in gymnastics, but she’s still not quite ready to be in a group class. We are eagerly waiting for summer to take her swimming because she just loves water and apparently has no fear of it.


She is approaching her 2nd birthday in April and daycare is getting ready to transition her from the toddler class to early pre-school. Sounds so grown up, doesn’t it?

The other reason I haven’t posted a lot of photos of Kayleigh is that she hates having her picture taken. In fact, when she sees a camera pointed at her, she’ll charge towards it, shouting, “No! No! No!” and will swat it out of your hands. So, I’ve been trying to be clever and sneak in some pictures with my iphone, but she has figured out that if I’m holding the phone a certain way I’m actually trying to take a picture and she’ll drop whatever she’s doing to attack the phone. However, if she's absorbed in watching her favorite movie, "Rio," as in the picture above, I can get away with a few snapshots.