Birthday Photos

Pictures of the birthday girl...

Opening Auntie Jennifer and Shelly's present

(Princess crown, tutu, birthday girl shirt and ballerina doll)

Tiny cakes

Eating leftover cake (and not sharing with Luca)

Pouty at her Party

Blues Clues Cake

I'm 2!

Cecily is 2 years old today! She woke up this morning ready to open presents. See her below in her new bathrobe and new doll, "Baby Cutie". More pictures to come as more birthday moments enfold.

Serious..or Silly? The many faces of Cecily.

A few more wedding pictures

A family picture

Sweet Angels

Angels? Or devils? Love the smirks...

Hands Up!

Little Miss Flowergirl

Cecily was a flowergirl in Mikey (Greg's cousin) and Eileen's wedding this past weekend. Also flowergirls were Lauren, Kaitlyn and Eileen's niece Jocelyn who is only a few days younger than Cecily. They were unbelievably cute and walked down the aisle quite well. Their duties ended there, thankfully, and they spent the remainder of the wedding eating the variety of snacks we brought and fidgeting in the pew. I had to whisk Cecily away to the sidelines quite a bit however as she kept yelling out "Stand Up" when people were kneeling down in prayer. It sounded alot like "Shut Up" which did not seem very appropriate.

The ceremony and reception (at the top of the St. Francis) were beautiful.

I will post more pictures when I get them from the wedding.

On an unrelated note, Cecily is getting VERY excited about her birthday (this coming Thursday and party this Sunday). She does not stop talking about cake, party, and very importantly, presents.

23 Months: Talking and Counting

Cecily's talking has been snowballing lately. She is just a non-stop chatterbug and constantly tries to engage whoever is around into having a "conversation" with her. And she does not approve of conversations between others that don't involve her! Her sentences are still quite limited in structure and length, but she manages to get her point across pretty well most of the time. An example of a more "complex" sentence she constructs is " I want Mac n'Cheese" or "Oh no! Broken. Fix it." She says "oh no!" about alot of things, giving a heightened sense of emergency to something as simple as a broken cracker (which, by the way, is very hard to "fix"). She also will call out to toys she is looking for "Baby Cassie, 'ere are you?" and another favorite phrase of hers is to look with shock at something with her palms spread out and say "What happened?" So cute.





She has a very great memory and will remember the tiniest little things about a place or a person. I guess some things that seem insignificant to us may seem very important to her. She can remember parts of books and most definitely songs. She has a new fascination with letters and knows which letter is for Cecily (C is her favorite letter of course), Berit, Addison, Mommy, Daddy, Nana/Nonno, and Grandma/Grandpa. She also can count to 10, sometimes skipping the number 5, and always in a very high pitched voice.

Her playing has definitely changed as well. She is all about "pretend play" and spends ALOT of time doing the following: "cooking" making cake or pasta, coffee in the morning; feeding her babies; playing doctor with her new doctor's kit, and bathing the babies. And still, music and dancing are some of her favorite activities.


And everything has to be done "Self" lately. She tries to accomplish all sorts of tasks on her own, some of which are more achievable than others. Getting dressed is sometimes near impossible for us as she is always wanting to do it herself and changing her mind about what she is going to wear and tearing around the room naked for a long time. Getting to places on time can be a challenge.

Potty training-still not officially started although she pees on the potty almost daily. We did try training pants last weekend to see how long it would last, and well, it didn't last very long. I did a big song and dance about big girl panties and how fun they were and to "just let me know when you need to go potty" I think she got the wrong idea and thought that I was telling her how fun it was to pee IN the fabulous new big girl panties because she proceeded to do so and then let me know right away-proudly-that she peed.

We are now one month shy of the 2 year mark and I can't believe how grown up our little baby Biagini has become!



Playing at Fort Funston

Checking out the Fire truck at our annual block party

At home with Baby Cassie

First Baseball Game

Cecily went to her 1st baseball game last night at AT&T park. Go Giants! She and Addison got My First Giants Tee-shirts (Pink) and baseballs (Pink) and certificates for their first game. It was lots of fun and they were good little girls!

Little Darling

Here is our little darling posing for pictures at Nana and Nonno's house. She is starting to become a bit more agreeable about getting her picture taken sometimes.

22 months old: Wolves, Words, and Won't eat!

Cecily loves wolves. It all started with the Big Bad Wolf in the 3 little pigs and Little Red Riding Hood and went from there. Definitely her fave animal. A little bit of an obsession.





She is talking talking talking lately. She does get frustrated when we don't understand her so I notice her making an effort to enunciate better. Such as she used to call a puppet-puppa which sounded alot like papa (which she calls any old looking man-such as the "papa noah" little person that goes with the little people ark, and she also calls a snowman papa bc of the papa snowman in the "snowbaby cant sleep' book) but now says it with the t at the end. She is continuing to add two words together to make her little sentences such as "come on" (a current fave) "over there" "this way/that way" "another one" "mama fix it". She will throw a bunch of words together in a "sentence" to communicate something such as "Momma, daddy, Blues Clues, off, other one" to tell me that she wants me to put another episode of Blue's Clues, and she's mad daddy turned it off. She is big into opposites and will go around saying "Up/Down" "Open/Closed", etc. She will sing words to songs and complete my sentences. I'll say "the wheels on the bus go...and she'll say "round and round" She knows her colors and will tell me how many fingers I am holding up (as long as its one, two, three, or four). She can name all the animals at the zoo (well most of them) and also all the characters on Blues Clues. Which, by the way, is a current thorn in our side, she is addicted to Blues Clues. I have used this program to soothe her, distract her, entertain her and now it is turning into a big problem. She has had a bad cold with a fever this last week and I let her watch alot of it (we had been previously letting her watch ONE episode every few days or so) Now it is out of control. I did not intend to have my child be addicted to television! At least she still loves her books as well...







Other things I had set out so well doing such as giving her such a wide variety of healthy organic foods and being so pleased with how much she ate and how she ate broccoli, spinach, avocados, etc. Now sometimes I find myself begging her to eat ice cream, just so she'll eat something! My fridge becomes full of all these plastic colored bowls of food she has rejected. Currently she will eat eggs, cheese, macaroni and cheese, sometimes yogurt, berries (especially blueberries), raisins or dried cranberries, occasionally oatmeal on a good day, sometimes black beans, raviolis if we're lucky, and broccoli if we're REALLY lucky and we caught her off guard. And then of course she is all abt the junk like cookies and goldfish crackers. Sometimes all she will accept is cream cheese licked off a cracker and fruit leather. And just forget about trying the cutsey stuff like making a face with raisins or something, she doesn't go for it.

While we haven't started potty training yet, we have had the Baby Bjorn potty seat for several months now and on some weeks she uses it at least once a day (most common time: before bath) She definitely has control over when she pees, and loves to do it and receive the endless praise we give her. But of course, as stubborn as she is, it has to be on HER terms and I am treating this situation very gingerly so as not to create a negative aura around the whole thing. I even went and bought a second potty to have downstairs and some big girl panties (training pants) so that when the time is right, we have the necessary accessories to move this along. But again, Im in no hurry, Im just glad she understands the concept and for the moment, pee pee in the potty is a happy thing for her.

She is big on "pretend play" and enacts all sorts of activities such as shopping, taking her dollies on a walk in the stroller, cooking, making tea and coffee. Her favorite thing must be playing outside however, playing with sand, water, dirt, carting lemons around in her wheelbarrow, going to the beach (no fear of the water runs right for the waves and splashes).
























She's been a little mommy obsessed lately, and is throwing the old "yes mommy, no daddy routine" which is hard on all involved. She's been battling a bad cold and been back and forth to the doctors to make sure it hadn't developed into a bacterial infection, and the extra stress of this has made her even more clingy with her momma. She also insists I bathe with her sometimes, which is fine when we are in the shower, but is not quite the relaxing and efficient shower time that I need. It rather entails me crouching down in a lukewarm shower drawing pictures of animals with the bath crayons on the shower wall.

So we are battling with the dilemma of having to start some level of discipline and firmness as our little girl is on the brink of turning two and is showing signs of needing some "authoritative guidance" and also having trouble breaking away from comforting our little baby and giving her all she needs and desires. Its a tough transition...but we are finding a balance that will work with all of us.

Mendocino Weekend

We had a wonderful 4 day weekend at a house in Mendocino (town of Elk, officially) with the Biaginis and Hagels. Weather was nice and warm when we first got there and then the fog rolled in later in the weekend. Cecily, Lauren and Kaitlyn played non-stop and there was a good balance of laughter to even out the occasional temper tantrum/throw herself down on the floor/jealous rage/tears of grief over stolen toys, etc. She LOVED the beach and wanted to splash splash splash and run run run and fall face forward on the sand. She and Luca would stay at the beach all day if we would let them. She did pick up a bit of a bug at the end of the trip (or just bad car sickness from the windy roads, hard to tell for sure) but all in all a wonderful time!