18 Months

Sweet Pea,

Today you are 18 months old! It's hard to believe that it has only been 18 months since you've joined our family. Papa and I can barely even remember our lives without you - all that sleeping and eating out and traveling and being lazy on a Sunday morning and getting to do whatever we want whenever we want feels like a lifetime ago! And as much as we sometimes yearn for some of those things, we wouldn't go back to that lifetime for anything. Our lives are so much better with you in them - you have made us a family! So, I wanted to give you a little glimpse into your life at 18-months:

At 18 months you remain a very good sleeper. We have been lucky on this front - so thank you sweet pea! Although you do still kind of owe us one from when you were a newborn and refused to sleep at all for the first several weeks (or was it months?) of your life. But, pretty much since six months old you have been sleeping through the night and taking two very consistent and lengthy (1-2 hours, sometimes 3) naps a day, which I appreciate very much. While we were in Hawaii you made the dreaded switch to one nap a day and this has been somewhat of an adjustment for all of us. There are days when it is pretty clear that you need two naps but you refuse to take a second so we just tough it out. We're working out a schedule to maximize all of our happiness throughout the day. It's looking like we'll spend the morning out having fun and then have you take a nap in the afternoon. On this schedule you have sometimes even taken a 4+ hour nap in the afternoon!

I think all of the sleep you get has been doing good things for your brain development. At 18 months you are extremely verbal. I am very appreciative of this because you are often able to communicate your needs somewhat coherently. At you 18-month appointment we were given a little handout about an 18 month old's development that said you should have between 5-10 words. We felt like you had more than this so one day Papa and I decided to try to count all of your words. Each time you said something we wrote it down on a little scrap of paper. We only included words whose meaning you knew (since you repeat almost everything we say but don't necessarily know what it means). After we wrote them all down Papa typed it up and alphabetized it so we wouldn't count any words twice. Guess how many words were on the list?!? We stopped counting around 150 words! I actually think you have many more than this but we decided it would be too tedious to try to capture them all! Wow, you are one verbal baby. I have a feeling we are in for many conversations over the years and I couldn't be more excited about this!

The hard part for me about you only taking one nap is coming up with activities that keep you entertained for the now longer parts of the day when you are not asleep. You are extremely active and always eager to move onto the next activity. It's hard to separate what is developmental (toddlers have notoriously short attention spans) and what is your personality (you do, after all, have two parents who get bored very easily), but either way you keep us moving. And you let us know when we aren't doing a good job by getting very fussy. As much as you demand new activities frequently, you will play quite happily by yourself too. I love watching you talk to you toys or read a book by yourself. I need to get this on video for you to see someday!

Your favorite activities right now are "stickers" (taking stickers off of one piece of paper and putting them onto another), "markers" (thank goodness for washable markers!), sharing you food/bottles with Apple and Elmo, going to the park, playing in the sandbox, playing with the water table and walking (meaning going for a walk down the street where you walk on your own rather than in the stroller). We are working on getting you to hold our hand when we walk on the sidewalk. You do not like this very much at all.

You have always been fairly independent (by this I mean you have always preferred to sleep in your own bed to sleeping with us, you have been a quick and efficient nurser rather than a lingering/cuddly nurser, you gladly and easily walk into the center of a room where you know no one without looking back to see if Papa or I was with you etc) but lately you are going through a clingy mommy phase. On the one hand it is flattering. It means all of the effort I have put in to nurturing you and taking care of you has worked - you are bonded to me. On the other hand it does make leaving the house without you kind of difficult and somewhat traumatic for both of us. I've heard that this can come and go over the years so right now we're just in a wait and see pattern.

You are a pretty good eater at 18 months; not too adventurous but fairly healthy. You have loved avocados pretty much since you started eating solids and you also like green beans, bananas, carrots, cucumbers, raspberries, strawberries, pasta, cheese, yogurt, pizza from the Ballard Farmer's Market (where we go almost every Sunday), crepes with spinach and swiss, bagels and challah bread. You refuse to eat meat, blueberries and cantaloupe. We've started giving you chicken nuggets out of desperation to get you to eat some meat and you are starting to like them more. I feel like we need to get a bit more adventurous (ie, eating what we eat instead of making you a separate meal with your favorite foods) with what we give you so perhaps that is a project for the next few months...

So Sweet Pea, that is a little bit of you at 18 months. You are such a sweet, smart, driven, opinionated, goofy, great kid. We are so lucky to have you. Every night before Papa and I go to bed we usually end up talking about the silly things you did during the day and how great you are. We couldn't love you any more than we do!

Love,
Mommy