Happy Half Birthday To My 2 1/2 Year Old!

I am constantly amazed at how much Bella's personality evolves in just a few short months.   She is everything I would expect a 2 year old to be...funny, energetic, creative, intelligent, and DEMANDING!!  Being such a good talker she can reason and manipulate to the point that it makes me mentally exhausted having to always be on my toes.  If I say do you want choice 'A' or 'B', she wants 'C' and by golly if something is blue and I tell her it is blue she will say it's red just to defy me.  But oh how I love my little strong willed girl. 

At 2 1/2 we are finally really flexible with our schedule.  She goes to bed between 8 and 9 and wakes up around 7:30 and 8 and naps about 1.5 hours. We made the transition to a queen size bed (since we will be needing the crib shortly) and she did wonderfully.  She still isn't potty trained and daily will tell me, "mommy, I don't want to wear panties.  I still just want to wear diapers".   In the mornings she and I try to get out of the house for fun with friends or else she loves to play in her playroom, and evening consist of a lot of wrestling and jumping on the bed with daddy!  She is a much more picky eater but cheese and peanut butter and crackers will always suffice if she doesn't like what I've cooked.  Her world is ALL about dressing up like a princess.  We have 5 costumes that we wear every waking moment we are at home and getting out of the house has become a serious battle because she simply doesn't want to take them off.  She insists I refer to her as the princess she is dressed as and goes around the house twirling and accessorizing. 

Other Milestones:
-She loves to sing and knows all the nursery rhymes and hams it up by making up her own songs.  Her first original was one called "One More Bite" and it simply is sung "One more bite, one more bite.....that's all"!! 
-She knows her alphabet and colors in Spanish. She loves to play "I Spy" using colors.
-She goes around naming objects and then telling me what letter they start with.  Or will say "G, what starts with G?" and then will name the things she can think of.  I think she will be reading at an early age!
-She can spell her name, count backward from 20, knows her days of the week/months of the year, all the shapes, and her left vs. right.
-It breaks my heart but she pronounces almost everything perfectly now, except fiddle which she refers to as "fibble".  (The last of her mispronounced words included blanqwee (blankie), pinow (pillow), cuner (color), and basagna (lasagna))
-It happened a few months ago but she voluntarily said grace before dinner.  She said, "Dear Jesus, Thank you for this food...um, um....thank you for our blessings....um, um, um.....thank you for daddy....um, um, um, um....in Jesus' name, Amen"!!!