Happy 18 Month Birthday, Makenna!

Makenna has now officially reached a year and a half. She is so full of life, energy, giggles, silliness, and sweetness!

Here's a little update about what Makenna's like at this age:

• As most toddlers, she hardly ever sits still. She's a runner, jumper, and climber.
• This girl loves to dance. She dances on command, spins in circles, and walks on her tip-toes--clearly she'll end up in dance class!
• She still loves any and all strangers, which is very sweet, but also means we'll have to be more and more careful with her.
• She's adding new words on almost a daily basis. So far, we've got: Mama, Dada, Hi, Bye-Bye, Done, More, Up, Duck, Hot Dog {thanks to Mickey Mouse Clubhouse}, Doggie, and Amen. Then she jabbers in her own language all the time. Once she really starts talking, I have a feeling we won't be able to get her to stop.
• If you ask her about these animals, she'll tell you what they "say": Cow, Duck, Monkey, or Lion. Oh, and dinosaur, too.
• She is still a fantastic sleeper and a good eater on most days, though she has her picky toddler moments.
• She is still mostly wearing 12-month clothing. Her 18-month wellness check isn't until next week, but six weeks ago, she weighed in at 20 pounds and 3 ounces. I'm guessing she's somewhere in the 21 pound-range now.
• Makenna adores books and brings us book, after book, after book to read. I have many books of hers memorized word for word, cover to cover.
• She also loves to "sing" and sometimes when she's singing along, she will throw her hands in the air during the dramatic parts.
• She has upwards of twelve teeth now, including many molars.
• She has become more attached to the little bunny she sleeps with and her paci {actually, we call her paci the Hungarian word for it, which sounds like "Sue-mee", just because we like it!}. We want to wean her from the paci soon, but also want to make sure we don't do it in the middle of a teething episode.

And now, I would like to devote a moment to talk about her hair. 

I do love Makenna's hair and naturally, as her mother, I think it's gorgeous. Now that it's longer it has all these natural waves, too. But I also have a bit of a love/hate relationship with her hair. Most 18 month-olds do not have long hair like this. It is constantly getting messy from food and teething drool. She's too young to be patient enough to sit still for me to do her hair nicely so I always feel like it looks disheveled. Plus, although she has lots of hair, it's super-fine, which means it slides out of elastics easily. After any nap, I have to re-do the elastics in her hair because they have slid out. It's like her hair is an entity of its own. Still, I do love how unique it makes her! I am loving the blonde streaks that are appearing this summer; it almost looks like she's gotten highlights.

I might as well take this time to add in a few things I haven't mentioned before related to Makenna, though these are very belated thoughts.

• People have asked where we came up with Makenna's name and middle name. I had been holding onto the name Makenna as a favorite girl name possibility since high school. I first thought of it when watching one of my favorite movies, Somewhere In Time. {This film was incidentally filmed on Mackinac Island}. The main character in the movie is so lovely and elegant, and her name is Elise McKenna. That's when I first decided that McKenna would make a beautiful first name.
• Matt and I had differing opinions on how we should spell Makenna's name. He wanted the way that we spell it now {Makenna} and I liked McKenna. He didn't like the "Mc" because it literally means "son of." And his opinion is that the "Mc" should be for last names only. Makenna was my 2nd choice of name-spelling, and since the name Makenna was my suggestion in the first place, I agreed that we should go along with his preferred spelling and make sure he felt really good about it.
• We had the aforementioned discussion about the spelling of Makenna's name at various points during the pregnancy, but we finalized our decision in the car, on the way to the hospital in the middle of the night, after my water had broken.
• We chose "Rose" for several reasons. First of all, it's my favorite flower. We've both always liked the name "Rose" in general, but I felt especially drawn to it. We also felt that a shorter middle name sounded better with "Makenna."
• Since I was a teenager, I had also held the name "Katie" in my mind as one of my top choices for a girl's name. Then, not too long after we got married, a certain pop star made her way into the mainstream music world. {If you don't recall, our last name is Perry.} I was really hoping that her debut smash hit called "I Kissed A Girl" would be a one-hit-wonder and then she'd fade into oblivion. No such luck. She took the name I had wanted, and her real last name isn't even "Perry"!
• I never got a picture of my pregnant belly at 39 weeks. With our apartment-to-first-house move occupying so much of our time at 36 weeks pregnant, that was the last time we took a "bump" photo. It was on my "to do" list to get one last "bump" pic before Makenna's due date, but since she came early, it never happened. And honestly it just didn't cross my mind to do it at the hospital!

Makenna makes us smile and laugh constantly. What a joy she is to us! We can hardly remember life before her and we treasure her little life beyond all compare. Thank you, Jesus, for our darling little girl!