24 months - Happy Birthday!!

Just a quick update because I need to go to catch up on some sleep now that birthday celebrations are all over. Kumi is two!! Where the time goes, I will never know. Above is a dress I made for her birthday -- a summer dress from a super easy pattern in a Japanese craft book (I'll post the details later). It turned out to be quite a sexy little number. She takes her job as my clothes model very seriously, this girl. She turned her back to me, struck a pose and commanded me to take a photo of the back of the dress. No joke. This is the resulting shot:

On her actual birthday (yesterday), we had a mellow and incredibly fun day. We started out the day with presents, and Kumi delighted in tearing the wrapping paper off savagely. Then we had a lovely vanilla cake with whipped cream and green sprinkles (her choice).

She really liked it.

We then headed out to Bainbridge Island. After a 20-minute ferry ride over, we arrived at the ultimate destination: the aquatic center. Here, the three of us played and swam for several hours and I'm pretty sure Kumi thought she was in heaven. MF even attempted the rope swing -- what a man. Here she is in her new teddy bear "flotation device" from Grandma and Grandpa. She LOVES it.

My little girl is growing up. These last couple of years have been phenomenal -- now that she can express herself in quasi-full sentences, communication has taken on a whole new level of complexity. A lot of the guesswork has been taken out, but I still need to decipher a fair amount, and this often leads to meltdowns of extreme proportions when I get it wrong. At the same time, she seems to grasp and express the indescribable concepts of love and empathy and her sweet gestures and words surprise me frequently (a stroke on the cheek, a whispered "I love you", an offering of her toy when I look sad).

I can also tell that her imagination is blossoming and she spends a lot of time telling stories to herself.

It's a wonder to watch, but it also has the downside of bringing frightening things to life. For the last three weeks, she has refused to sleep through the night, sobbing that "maybe dark is scary" and at some point in the wee hours, you can find me lulling her to sleep by singing the ABC song over and over and over...

Happy Birthday, Kumi. May the year be filled with an abundance of swimming and love and friends and light. Here's a shot of MF being good-natured while Kumi tries to shove her finger up his nose. As an aside, I made the green shirt for his birthday, which was a week before Kumi's -- it was very difficult and I had to re-do the collar FOUR times. Anyway. This turned out to be a longer post then intended. Must go.