Nineteen Months

So I'm cheating a bit. As I begin this post, we are in the middle of a week of travels and you are half way to being 20 months. Maybe it was your walking or maybe its because I think of these monthly posts as going along with your check-up visits (which are getting less frequent, one at 2 yrs then annually), but it feels like it is time to start making posts that are less about what month you're in and more about the the neat things you do and say. I worry a little that, without the monthly updates, I'll not make myself post regularly. Clearly I've let it slide this month anyway. I guess we'll just see how it goes. It's too hard now to remember when exactly you've started the things you're doing now, so here's just a snapshot of where you are now.

We waited so long for you to walk, that it's hard to write a post without an update about that. You are, of course, walking like a champ now. You have moments when you get very excited and seem to think about running. You either march in place excitedly or you run a bit with your knees out to the side. I think you look a bit like a frilled neck lizard in a nature video. As cute as that is, the neatest thing for me about your walking is the way you tackle the new challenges you find as a result. First it was learning to go up and down hills, lately you've been really focused on finding your own way to get down stairs. When you work on those things you become very focused and want to practice them repeatedly until you've mastered them or until I make us stop. It is quite common for me to take you to the park and for you to spend our whole time there walking up and down a ramp or stepping from the curb to the grass and back. You don't always show this same tenacity in learning other things. I'm hoping you will eventually.

I don't think it was much of a coincidence that you are asserting yourself more since you started walking. This has been most apparent at mealtimes. Once my little foodie, you have become a little picky. For two days you went on a bit of food strike. You refused to eat what I fed you (which you had previously eaten with gusto) and consequently ate nothing between breakfast (8 am) and dinner (6 pm) for 2 days. You lost a pound. As much as I'd like to think that you "learned your lesson," I have to admit that I learned one too. It has become a little more of a challenge to get green veggies in you, but I've changed your menu quite a bit and most days you are eating like a champ again. Your most consistent idiosyncrasy is a dislike/mistrust of anything stringy. You will eat pureed greens, but if you get a wilted stem or a leaf that the blender missed, that's where you draw the line. Last week you really had a dilemma with melted cheese. You love the cheese, but were weirded out by the stringiness. True to toddler form, you might decide one meal to the next that the thing you love is the thing you are most offended to see on your plate. We can work with that though!

Helping you assert all your likes and dislikes is a rapidly expanding vocabulary. You have tried out several new words a day over the last week. I'm not sure how many you have, but there have to be more than 100. Most of them are hard for others to understand and the vast majority are lacking the ending syllables/consonants. Watch is "wa," cup is "cuh," bowl is "bow," etc. With all the new and less familiar family members you've seen in the last three days, you've named only two. Grandpa seems to be "bapa," which is hard to distinguish sometimes from "bye-bye," and Lah-oo is "oo-oo." When you don't know what something is called or are too shy to say, you call it "da-bmm." I have no idea what that means.

You've also had some big social changes in the last month. These might have been tougher for me than for you. In April, I decided sick season had passed enough and your schedule had changed enough that we could check out the kids in some different nursery settings. We now go to the YMCA nursery two days a week, and you have grown to like it I think. Some days there are more kids there than others, but there are always different toys from what we have at home and you like the woman who works there. Unfortunately you've also had a runny nose for three of the last four weeks. I guess we have to build up your immune system sometime. It was a really rough several weeks getting you used to being dropped off there, but I think it's helping both of us, so thanks, buddy, for sticking it out.

I'm embarrassed to close this post without any pictures or video attached, but they are harder and harder to come by these days. Here's a call to our family and friends. If you have any form the last month, please forward them and I'll post here. I know there are a few from our recent travels, I hope I'll get them and be able to post those separately.