18 months!

Our sweet girl turns 18 months today! We've catapulted from being content to sit and play to being busy, busy, busy! Climbing everything she can find, including finally mastering getting onto the couch, window seat, and rocking chair. She announces her victory with her hands up in the air to say "so big!"

I am feeling better that we are doing just fine with verbal expression now and are probably "right on track" with around 15-20 attempted words. She tells us dad, mama, ball, dog, bread, more, book "buh", bubble "buh buh", okra "o-ra", up "uhhhhh", down "doooon", neigh neigh for horse, baby "bebe", vacuum is "va", embarrassed to say she knows "bra" perfectly hahaha, hi, bye, all done, boot, lala (for aunt lauren) and NO! :-) along with many animal sounds. She is trying to mimic sounds, so when I say a word and ask if she can say it, she will often try to repeat part of it. I've tried not to do too many more signs, because she won't even attempt many of the words that she's learned as signs. And if we do a gesture with any word, she seems more inclined to only repeat the gesture. So when I have said "beep beep" about cars and motioned a beep, she will only do the motion.

She has been very interested in the potty this past month, so we are slowly working our way into that process! She tells me every time she is about to have a poopie by waving her hand in front of her face like it stinks. :-) She still doesn't want to sit on the potty to actually poop or pee, but she does like sitting there and going through the process of getting toilet paper, wiping herself, closing the lid, flushing the potty, and washing her hands. Not sure exactly how she feels about her big girl potty seat that arrived this week. She seems to like climbing up and sitting down on it frequently, but she does not want to stay there for long. We are starting off with a toilet seat reducer with a step ladder attached. Since she really likes the big potty but just can't sit up there alone, I thought I'd try her out on there with a supportive seat and handles to see how it goes. Would be nice so I don't have to clean a chamber!! :-) She's totally bent on taking off her diaper at naptime, so I've resorted to duck taping her diaper on at naptime after giving her a clean one and a chance to tinkle on the potty first. Without the duck tape, we've had 5 instances in the last week where she took off her diaper and proceeded to pee on the bed. Sigh... So she's definitely telling me she doesn't want to be dirty anymore, but we haven't connected it to the joy of going on the potty yet and feeling clean. I'm sure when she's ready and not a day before, that connection will come.

Some favorites right now are books, painting, scribbling, accessorizing (this girl loves her bracelets and bags!), and feeding and caring for dolls and stuffed animals. And going outside! She is oblivious to the freezing cold weather and asks to go outside often.

We are getting an upper canine tooth breaking through this week with another one really close, so foods have needed to be soft. E is also telling us her preference to have all of her foods separate on her plate. Nothing can be mixed together or she refuses to eat it and starts to fling it on the ground! Flinging food has not been a problem up until the last couple weeks. But she's also battling fluid in ears after her first ear infection, so I think that combined with the teething pain is making her a little less patient with things being less than perfect in her little world. :-) She's doing awesome using her spoon each day to eat her cereal and yogurt. That is also an area where she gets easily frustrated, though. She is now not content if a cheerio falls off her little spoon on the way to her mouth. We all lose a few cheerios along the way, haha, but she really really wants everything to make it to her mouth now. Clean little girl. :-)

I got a little insight into her today that I wasn't expecting. She's been cuddling dolls and stuffed animals tons lately, but I saw the first sign today of recognition of treating things with care without my prompting. We have this little bowling pin set that has animal faces on the pins. I brought it out for the first time and showed her how you roll a ball to knock down the pins. She started wimpering when all the animals got knocked down! She quickly went over and grabbed one and hugged it. Greg laughed and said, "Difference between boys and girls!" So true! 

She's having fun learning to socialize and recognize her friends a little more now. She smiles really big when I say we are going to play with friends. And E's gotten pretty good at trying to say her friends Ben and Aubree's names.

We go in for her 18 month appt next week, so I don't know her stats, but she's comfortably in 2T shirts and still in 12-18 month pants. Looong torso. Pray with me if you think about it that the fluid in her ears will be gone by the appt on Wednesday. They said on Thursday that it is common to have this after an ear infection, but that if it doesn't go away on its own it can affect her hearing and speech and also might mean we need tubes. :-( I thought since we'd never had an ear infection before that getting one this late in the game would mean we were free from the need for tubes. But you never know, I guess.