Rainbow Dash

Yesterday, July 26, was the Feast of Saints Anne and Joachim. This has always been a big deal in my family because it is my feast day, as well as my mom's and my grandmother's, and of course now, Ana Luisa's. We celebrated by having a delicious Mexican dinner with my parents and my sisters. For dessert, we had cupcakes, which Ana Luisa thoroughly enjoyed.
She even licked the tablecloth in front of her, just to make sure she got every last crumb and smear of frosting (except the ones stuck to her face and hair, of course).

Over the last month or so, we've noticed a significant lack of girly toys around here. If you want trains, trucks, dinosaurs or toddler-sized sports equipment, we've got you covered. We also have plenty of gender-neutral standard baby toys: stacking cups, stacking rings, rattles, rubber duckies for the bathtub, etc. But not a whole lot of pink. So we decided that for Ana Luisa's feast day gift, we would get her a very girly toy: a My Little Pony. Jeff picked out Rainbow Dash for her, and we gave it to her after dinner. She knew exactly what to do. She immediately took the little hairbrush that comes with the pony, and started combing the pony's hair.
Being the great big brother that he is, Juan Pablo decided that as long as we're going to have these weird brightly colored cartoonish horses around here that look nothing like the horses that are part of his animal collection, he should learn a thing or two about them. He spent a good amount of time studying the leaflet that came with the pony and learning the names of all the other ponies.

We're pretty sure Ana Luisa has also noticed the lack of girly toys around here. She LOVES Rainbow Dash. She had a hard time settling down to sleep last night because she wanted to play with her (I ended up having to take Rainbow Dash out of the room where Ana Luisa couldn't see her). Today after naptime, I had Ana Luisa in my arms, and she spotted Rainbow Dash's hairbrush sitting on the kitchen counter. She started frantically pointing and making her "Ah ah ah!" noises that she makes when she really wants something. Once I gave her the brush, she wanted down, so I put her on the floor and she took off crawling as fast as she could towards the playroom to find her pony. What a girly girl! We are so enjoying watching her get excited about things like this.

And because she's so cute, here are a couple more pictures of our sweet girl. She is very helpful when it comes to household chores, which is a good thing since she does make the most significant contribution to the messes around here:
And she's extremely flexible. EXTREMELY. How she is comfortable sleeping like this, I have no idea.
Good Saint Anne, mother of her who is our life, our sweetness and our hope, pray for us!