There Was A Little Girl...

by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

There was a little girl, 

Who had a little curl,

Right in the middle of her forehead.

And when she was good, 

She was very, very good.

But when she was bad...

She was horrid!

That's my girl.  She really is the sweetest little angel.  And is sooo loving and fun most of the time.  She had the cutest little voice and such an angelic little face.  Her blonde hair glows like a halo in the sunlight, and her blue eyes just melt your heart.  She loves her little brother more than anything in the world and cares about him and his happiness.  Her mommy is her best friend and she always wants me to be happy and healthy.  She adores her daddy and always wants him to be proud of her, and she wants so bad to be big like her big brother.  She is such a fun girl!  

But then again, there are those times...when she is bad...no...HORRID!  :)

Anyway, here are some pictures form the past 3 or 4 months of my girl.  The pictures are not in any order other than the way they come up in iphoto, so skip all over the place as far as theme.  I have two cameras that I use regularly so they're not even in order...

She loves her grandpa.  Especially when she has his undivided attention.

 And she loves her grandma too.  And LOOOOVES reading books.  I am pretty sure my mom is her favorite story teller!

 She is incredibly independent.  She loves to dress herself.  This is one of her outfits she picked out and put on herself.  Swimming suit, one water shoe, and one cowboy boot!  :) 

 Look how proud she is!  (Oh and by the way, she is obsessed with her water shoes.  She has like six pairs of hand me down water shoes that all fit right now, and she loves them and wants to wear them all the time.  I usually make her put on regular shoes if we're going out but every now and then I give in and let her wear her water shoes.)

WARNING:  THE NEXT FEW PHOTOS ARE NOT FOR THE FAINT OF HEART...OR STOMACH...  This is where the HORRID part comes in.  

Melia has a best friend, Brinley, whom she ADORES.  She wants to play with Brinley every second of every day.  I am pretty sure Brin feels the same about Melia.  The second these girls wake up in the morning, they are asking to play with eachother.  Brinley is a little more than a year older than Melia but they get along great and play for hours on end.  Of course they fight, like all 2 and 3 year olds do, but for 2 and 3 year olds, their fights are kept to a minimum.  With these two, however, fighting is the least of our worries.  

These girls are RASCALS.  You get the two of them together and the mischief is not doubled, it is quadrupled.  These girls are little fiends when they get together.  

So the other day Missy (Brinley's mom) and I were in the living room chatting and taking care of our boys when we decided it'd been a little quiet downstairs where the girls were.  Missy went down to check on them and came running back upstairs swearing at me to come and see what the girls had done.  Well...really what MELIA had done.  

Missy was carrying up one of Melia's play frying pans, and it was full to the brim with diarrhea...

Oh my goodness...sooooo gross.  Luckily Missy is a nurse and is not faint of heart or stomach...oh heaven bless Missy...I don't know what I'd do with out her.  At any rate, Melia had decided to poop right into this little frying pan.  But instead of poop, it was pure liquid diarrhea.  But, folks, don't you fret, the story doesn't stop there.

Melia then proceeded to POUR the liquid fecal matter into her little dolly potty.  Now, this was not the first time her dolly potty had encountered such a mess.  Quite a few months ago when I used to teach joy school at our house, Brinley had decided to pee into the dolly potty.  She got into lots of trouble and all the kids got a lecture about how the dolly potty was not for going potty in.  About a month after that, Melia had proceeded to also pee in the dolly potty.  So by now, she KNOWS this is not an okay thing to do...but she poured her poop in it anyway...

 But that was not even the worst part.  Because then they proceeded to pour more of the awful, smelly feces into her doll house potty.  She got this Fisher Price Happy Sounds Doll House for Christmas from Mike's mom and it is soooo cute and electronic...which was not helping our situation as there was diarrhea seeping down into the crevices of the buttons...  OH.MY.GOSH.  Can you see the diarrhea even on the carpet.  It was sooo horribly gross.  Lucky for me Missy did most of the cleaning as I thought I was going to vomit.  I am telling you guys, I swear Missy is heaven sent.

 Melia got in lots of trouble and I threw away her dolly potty.  I was so tempted to throw away that whole doll house but I just love it so much so we cleaned it thoroughly.  I told Melia if she does things like that with her toys then they go in the garbage.  She cried a lot and kept telling me she didn't want the garbage man to take her dolly potty.  But goodness, I was not about to deal with any more nast in that dolly potty!

I just had to include this cute picture of Melia "mowing the lawn" with her friend Tyler.  For a while back in May we lived at Mike's parents' house while our kitchen was being remodeled.  They were out of town a lot of the time and it was so nice to live in such a beautiful home with a great big yard.  One Sunday evening we had our friends, the Millars over for dinner.  Melia had a lot of fun with their kids, especially Tyler, who is her age.

 Once again, this is a picture of Melia's independence.  I was getting Melia out of her jammies one morning and before I knew it she'd disappeared.  I finally found her out in the back yard running stark naked to go play in the playhouse!  :) 

 Melia loooooves her brother.  She especially loves to sit on him or lay on him, which I am not a big fan of (and most of time neither is he) but she really just adores him and loves to play with him.

 She also LOOOOOVES to vacuum.  She really loves cleaning and also loves to "nop" which means to mop.  She always asks if she can nop the kitchen and then will pronounce, "I'm nopping!"

 I was playing with my camera settings when I took this one.  It's still pretty fun though.  :)

 Here she is vacuuming her bedroom in her panties.  :)

 I bought these curlers for Melia at a garage sale and she is in love with them.  She always dumps them out on the floor and declares that she and Evera are "playing a game."

She also loved looking at herself with the curlers in.  She even liked to look at herself in the fireplace reflection.  :)

 She liked to flip her curlers around and watch it in the mirror.  She thought she was pretty funny with those curlers in.

 She also liked the way her hair was so pretty after.  :)

 She might be a rough and tumble little monkey but she is still a girly girl!

I don't know when these pictures were taken but they've gotta be kinda old.  

 She looks so young.

 This was my FAVORITE outfit of Melia's.  It was her Valentine's outfit.  Doesn't she just look so perfect in it?  Don't worry, you'll see more of this outfit in a few pictures down below.  ;)

Melia loves to help Daddy.

But also loves to be just like Mommy.  Gotta love the two different shoes.  This girl cracks me up.

 One night Melia was sick and didn't want to go to bed by herself.  Mike agreed to lay on the floor in her room until she fell asleep.  Of course he fell asleep long before she did, but she eventually fell asleep too.  :)  He's such a great dad and she adores him.

 Oh my crazy girl LOVES makeup!  She often sneaks into it when I am not looking and she gets in trouble.  But this particular time I let her put the lipstick on both of us.  Don't we look beautiful?!  :)

I told her how pretty we looked and then I let her see herself in the mirror.  I am not so sure what she thought.  She thought it was pretty silly though.

I just love this picture.  I think she looks so angelic.

 My sister Stephanie taught me how to do her hair like this.  Isn't it beautiful?!

 And from angelic we go to horrid...  I'm pretty sure I had sent her to her room because she was in trouble for something.  When I came to check on her she had climbed up onto her changing table and had gotten Desitin all over herself and all over the dresser.  Little stinker!  She's crying because she couldn't get down.  Lol.

 And her she is making herself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.  She was hungry and just decided to do it all herself.  She got out the bread and peanut butter and even found my special spreader knife.  This kid sure has a mind of her own!

 At one of Spencer's cub scout meetings, they gave Melia a cup with dirt and a sunflower seed.  She planted it and was pretty excited to watch it grow.  I had no idea that the flower would actually break out of the seed.  I mean I KNOW FLOWERS GROW FROM SEEDS but I thought the shell would disappear, not stay attached to the plant until it fell off.  It was fun to watch it grow but shortly after this picture was taken Melia destroyed it by pulling the top off and that was the end of our sunflower.

 One day we were all just hanging out inside and I don't know why, but Melia decided to go running out the front door and down the sidewalk in front of our house.  She didn't get very far before face planting on the cement.  The poor kid had blood pooling in her mouth and spilling all down her face.  This kid has vampire teeth and whenever she falls down tends to split her lip open.  Her nose and above her lip were a huge scab.  But she loved wearing her Strawberry Shortcake bandaid.  :)

 How cute is she?  She loved the SS bandaid so much she decided she wanted more on her face.  So unbenounced to me she snuck more bandaids for her face.  :)

 Here's Mike dancing in the kitchen with Melia.

This is Melia and her cute friend Tyson.  They are so silly together.

 My friend Linda got a new little chihuahua and Melia loved it.

 I think this picture is funny because they look so similar.  Lol.

 Here are Melia and Brinley hiding in my dresser.  These girls are so funny.

Melia thought these little cupboards were the greates when she discovered she could fit inside!

 She immediately wanted me to clear the other one out so that when Brin came over they BOTH could hide in them.  :)

 They are such cute friends.

 I took a bunch of pictures of Melia hoping for a good one for our cousins picture book for Mike's family's reunion.  She's in a slightly non-photogenic phase, but the pictures are still adorable.

 This girl LOVES to swing.

 Here's that adorable outfit again!

 Silly goose!

 This is her little cousin (second cousin) Abby.  We used to have Sunday dinner with Abby's parents every other Sunday at Mike's parents' house.  It was so fun to get to know Mike's cousin Skyler and his wife Meghan better.  But now they moved to Las Vegas and we're so bummed.  Melia and Abby had so much fun together at dinner each week.  We'll miss them a lot.

 More attempts at getting a great photo...

 Okay, these pictures are the best!  Melia was playing with her friends Brinley and Tyson.  Brinley decided to get one of Melia's fancy dresses out of her closet and put it on.  Melia of course then wanted to do the same.  The girls found one of Mike's hats in the bedroom and put it on Ty declaring that they were the princesses and that he was the prince.  The girls soon came complaining to me that Ty didn't want to be the prince and marry them.  I asked Ty if he wanted to be the prince and he very firmly declared he did not want to be the prince.  He then took me to Melia's room and pointed out a dress and told me he wanted to wear a dress.  :)  He wanted to be a princess too.  :)

 Judging from the incredible muscle and athleticism of this cute kid, I don't even hesitate to say this kid is ALL BOY.  He just wanted to be a princess with his friends!  :)

 Here's a picture after these two RASCALS got into my makeup.  I'm telling you, alone these girls are stinkers, but together THEY ARE TROUBLE!!  :)  But so stinkin' cute!

They sure love eachother though.  Oh yeah, and you can also take note of Melia's rockin outfit...this is another one of the ones she picked out herself--tee shirt, panties, leg warmers, and flip flops!  Lol!

 This is Melia and Brinley "getting married" i.e. hugging and dancing in a circle...

 

 Melia loves to climb on Evera's jumparoo which we borrowed from Brinley's little brother.  Melia is such a monkey!

 

And here are some more attempts at getting a good picture...

 If you couldn't tell, let me repeat, THIS GIRL LOVES TO SWING!

Mike's sister Anne and her family gave us their old swing set.  Melia LOVES it and is in heaven whenever she gets to go swing.  She especially loves the teeter-totter swing because she can make it go pretty high all by herself.

 She is so fun.

 This is the picture we ended up choosing for the book because while it shows her adorable smile, and beautiful blue eyes, it also shows her fun personality.

 Oh that face...

 I just love this girl!