We are still camera-less right now, so new pictures are still a few days or a week away. Here are some older ones from early summer in order to tide you over a little bit.
The little gardener helping Grandpa and Grandma harvest cauliflower as big as her head.
She ate big bites of the broccoli right out of the garden.
Despite the lack of new pictures, we do have a special treat for you today; a guest post from Charlotte's Grandpa Mark (Kristi's dad). Grandpa Mark is Charlotte's main daycare provider, so he spends more time with her than just about anyone. He hears all of the funny things she says, sees her accomplish new tasks, helps her learn new skills. Below are a few stories he shared with me about the last few days with Charlotte.
Story #1: I hear the typical sound of a "major" problem coming from the bedroom where Charlotte is playing. When I get there I see a
smiling face looking back up at me. I figure a false alarm or I mistook a call for me to come play or see something with a call of despair. "Hans suck in air" the smiling face says to me. "What?" I say. She repeats but points to the little school bus and opens the door of the bus: "Hans suck in air" and then I get it. "Hand was stuck in there."
Story #2: I was streaming music while cooking, cleaning kitchen etc. Charlotte is playing in the living room and I didn't think she was really listening to the music. But then all of a sudden she repeats some words from the current song. This happened with "They said Hallelujah!" and "Hear dat? Talking!" (when at the end of a song there was some whispering).
Story #3: Grandma, Grandpa, and Charlotte were walking down the road waiting for mama to come home from work. A white car was approaching in the distance. As it got closer Char said 'truck' so we knew it wasn't mama. When it drove past Charlotte said "man." Grandpa was impressed that she catches all this and he said to Charlotte: "You don't miss a thing, do you?" Charlotte responds in a sad little voice: "I miss Daddy."
Things Charlotte says at 2 years, 2 months old
1. Wanna sit in your "yap" (lap)
2. Gama YoYis (Lois)
3. Char: "Zit hard?" (when observing the someone trying to complete a task)
Grandpa: "oh it's not too hard"
Char: "Just a yittle-bitta hard?" (just a little bit hard?)
4. Fwing (swing)
5. Fruff (scruff, the elderly poodle)
6. Baby feeping (sleeping)
7. Ice freem (ice cream)
8. If someone sneezes she asks "ajees?" (allergies) She sneezed the other day while Grandpa was feeding her breakfast. She says; "Sha-Shoe ajees."
9. Sop it (stop it)
A few additions from Mama:
-She is working on the concept of waiting. When asking for chocolate milk, we told her she had to finish her white milk first. She waited a second or two, then asked "How 'bout now?"
-The other day Charlotte had a time out for being naughty, and when it was over she asked me "Happy now?" (she hates it when people are mad at her). When I said "No" she asked me "Mad, Mama?" I said "No." Then she asked "Kind of mad?"
-Grandma Cindy sings lots of songs to Charlotte, and yesterday my little listener impressed me with singing several lines of a song with all of the words when she woke up from her nap. "When the sun hits the sky you will wake feeling spry. Start the day with a smile, life is really worthwhile." Such a sunny little thing to sing right after a nap.
-Yesterday we went to an apple orchard to get a pumpkin. Charlotte LOVED running through the rows of pumpkins (wish I had some pictures!) and sitting on all of them. She insisted that we sing Happy Birthday to the pumpkins.
-Charlotte and I walked Daddy to work this morning. On our way home we walked through a patch of sunshine and she exclaimed "I yike sunshine!" Then as we sat on the front steps drinking hot chocolate and talking about fall I asked her what other things she likes. Included on the list were chocolate milk and oatmeal. Simple pleasures.
Like how there are two electrical outlets next to her bed? Don't worry, there are outlet covers that even the parents can't pull out.
This was another time where Charlotte wasn't really interested in getting her picture taken.
Reading to her baby in bed. For the first couple nights we had her bookshelf pushed against the bed to make sure she didn't fall out. 
"Charlotte. Charlotte! CHARLOTTE!!! Come here, mama wants to take your picture."
"Look up at mama for a nice picture."
"Why don't you sit down on the hay bales and you can smile for me."
"Just peek through that little hole at me. Won't it be fun?"
This is most of the garden, planted on the south side of the house. Our landlady okayed us to dig up "some" of the lawn to plant a garden; it got bigger than we had anticipated. Hopefully she isn't mad when we move out in 3 years and she realizes how big it is and has to re-grass that whole side of the yard!
Here is one of our 5 tomato plants. We had 3 heirlooms (2 pink/red ones and a yellow/red stripey one!), a roma, and a cherry. The heirlooms get big. Really big.
Here is Charlotte holding our largest heirloom tomato. Yes, that is just one tomato on her lap.
This is that same tomato. It had a bunch of splits/scars on it from getting so big! And we didn't use anything other than a little compost when we first planted the garden in June.
Here is a portion of our tomato harvest. We probably had about 4 times this many.
I had a hard time photographing the tomatoes. With a flash makes them too shiny and bright...without a flash makes it grainy and blurry and doesn't show off their color.
A roma and a couple of the cherry tomatoes. Charlotte was very willing to try the tomatoes, but she usually only took one bite and then was done, as seen in the above picture.
We grew a few bell peppers, supposedly a mix of different colors, though we really only saw green and a little purple. What started out at 30-some plants became 5 after an incident back in May and then 4 after something happened in July. Apparently peppers need to be planted inside WAY ahead of time in Minnesota which we did not do early enough. Our pepper harvest was small this year, but we learned a lot about what not to do! Better luck next year.
Here are the five peppers we ended up with. They were about the size of plum and unfortunately were probably not ripe yet because they were quite bitter. And by bitter I mean I would have preferred not to eat them at all because they were so bitter. But alas, if you plant seeds in April/May and sort through a large amount of dirt to find and replant each individual seed after a toddler disrupts their incubator and tend the plants all summer long and rescue them from the impending frost at night in the dark with a flashlight, then by golly we're going to eat them.
Don't they look delicious? At least you can pretend they are; I still have the aftertaste in my mouth.
Speaking of summertime harvesting of delicious vegetables, here was the view out our front window on Friday. Happy Fall!
Charlotte helping mama make a cake
Eating some corn on the cob, except she couldn't wait for it to get cooked, so she ate it raw!
Charlotte's great-grandma Rose Ann crocheted this poncho for her. Charlotte likes to wear it over just about anything. Or in this case, just a pair of underwear...
This is the face she made when I asked her to smile for a picture.
She likes to take care of our wooden camel; she carries him around and feeds him, covers him with blankets and puts him down for naps. He is as tall as she is.
Helping daddy bake something.
Grandma Cindy's birthday cake, an artistic rendition of a monarch butterfly.
Charlotte thought it was her birthday.
She likes cake and frosting.
The little gardener helping Grandpa and Grandma harvest cauliflower as big as her head.
She ate big bites of the broccoli right out of the garden.
