It's been awhile since I've done an Evie update. I want to keep blogging about Evie's milestones as a record for us and for Evie. I turned the first year of fushmush Evie posts into a baby book for her. Evie loves looking through the book though she doesn't understand that it's her. When you ask who is in the photos she says "baby!".

Evie's new catch phrase is "by myself". She likes to walk down the stairs "by myself", eat yoghurt "by myself" and build duplo towers "by myself". She's also started to want to read her bedtime stories "by myself". It's so cute. All her stories start "Once upon a day....".

Unfortunately, "by myself" sometimes turns into shouting and crying. She gets really frustrated if she isn't able to do it independently and she won't accept my help. Ah, the joys of toddlerhood.

Evie has also picked up Mummy's habit of using over the top adjectives to describe situations. The other morning when I was talking about what we would do that morning - nappy change, breakfast, play with Duplo farm - Evie responded with "perfect!". She murmurs "mmm delicious...." to herself as she eats the most ordinary of meals (at least she enjoys Mummy's cooking!). The other day Evie decided that "Awesome!" was going to be her new word of the day. I rang Andrew so she could tell Daddy "awesome!" on the phone. It's my fault as I tend to overuse that particular word.

Living on the third floor has certainly helped Evie learn how to count. We often count the stairs on each flight as we walk down to the ground floor. Evie's had 1 to 10 down for a bit but she surprised us the other day by continuing up to 14. We read lots of books which count through the numbers 1 to 10 but we haven't really focused on anything after 10. I'm always at amazed at how quickly and easily they pick new things up. She's picked up the numbers after 10 from somewhere.

With the number of photos we take we may have created a little attention seeker. Evie often stops and says "Mummy. Photo please." She then happily poses, says "cheese" and will run over to look at the photo. The result is 5 million photos on my iphone which look like this. Evie doesn't quite understand that it's the "eeeeeese" part of cheese which makes the smile.

However, here is a nice photo requested by Evie where she actually managed to smile.

Read the rest of the Growing Evie posts here.