At play

Ashtyn has always been a playful girl (I remember more than one person saying when she was a baby, "she just looks for reasons to laugh, doesn't she!"). Lately her play has been branching out a bit.

For one, she's been getting more into dress-up play than ever before. She's more of an accessorizer than a dress-up girl when it comes to pretend play: she loves the jewelery and shoes and bags a lot more than dress up clothing. It took a lot of coaxing to get these gaudy costume earings off. :)

Ashtyn is also quite the little artist. This is a picture she drew during a family night about what she was thankful for: her "happy family" (keep in mind she's only two). Her favorite artsy activity? hands down--painting rocks. We have quite the collection.

This next picture combines two of Ashtyn's favorite things to do: play board games and organize. We usually "play" a few board games a day, and Ashtyn has always been the little organizer. She loves to sort things and is constantly organizing her stuffed animals into perfect little rows so she can put them to sleep or whatever. She seriously did this by herself--I had ran upstairs to use the bathroom and got distracted by getting all the garbage upstairs. When I came down, this is what I found:

And last but not least, Ashtyn loves letters. LOVES letters. She's constantly singing the alphabet song, asking me to spell things with her magnets, asking me what letters make what sounds, playing with her blocks that have letters, and even typing on the computer (she thinks that's super awesome and has even learned about the enter button and the backspace button; consequently, she's pretty self-sufficient until she wants a new color. She'll sit and type while I cook dinner and just asks me how to spell all sorts of words while she types them on the computer). When typing she gets the letters in the right order and can spell Ashtyn, Mom and Dad without any help (and can recognize a half-a-dozen more--mostly stores like TJMaxx, HyVee, etc.), but for some reason with the magnets she just puts the letters in whatever order she found them in:

What a little smarty we have. Frankly it's a bit much to keep up with! She keeps asking me these questions that I don't think 2-year-olds should ask: "why does it rain, where is heaven, what does ____ mean (EVERY new word she hears) how come some apples are red and some are green," etc. She even did a little math problem in the tub a few nights ago--she wanted to stay in longer and we agreed on "3 more minutes." After awhile I said, "OK, only one more minute left." Ashtyn promptly replies, "it's been 1, 2 minutes (holding her little fingers up as she counts), now just 1 more minute." Tyler and I just looked at each other rather wide-eyed and said, "um, yeah, that's right."

Anyway, our little girl is too smart. She just popped out that way--we knew it from the beginning. Now we have that all-too-important-job of not messing her up! What a daunting task that sometimes seems....