17 months

Anya is 17 months today. It is a lovely Sunday here at the Lodwig house. The sun is actually out (this has been an awful, wet, cold few months we've had), Anya is spending the day with Grandma and Grandpa Lodwig, and Chris and I are working on the basement den. I'm just taking a little break to update Anya's blog and run some errands.

Locomotion

Not much has changed this way over the last month. The only thing I can think of is that Anya really loves doing somersaults (props to her friend Luca for the idea). She can't do them on her own, but she gets herself in downward dog position (which she calls "upside down") and yells somersault! (which comes out as somesawwt) for me to help her flip over. Clapping ensues and we do it again. She also likes to "flip" on the bar at the playground, like she sees the big kids doing. I don't let her actually flip over. I more teeter her over the bar and she doesn't know the difference right now.

I think instead of doing the co-op preschool summer program, I'll sign her up for the Little Gym or see what's going on at Seattle Gymnastics Academy. She really seems to enjoy this sort of thing (like most kids, I'm sure) and it'll be a nice change of pace for a few months until "school" starts back up in the fall.

Speech

Many more words. The last week or two, Anya has started occasionally speaking in complete thoughts and once in awhile complete sentences. Some are "Grandpa, work. Airplanes and helicopters." (grandpa Lodwig works with helicopters, and there are also airplanes there). "Grandma at home," "I want peanut butter cracker" (this one I was most surprised by), "I want that", "I running!", "petting kitty"...

And once, when the stars were perfectly aligned and Anya was focused just right, she counted to 10 all by herself! She of course has no real concept of counting and doesn't know the difference between 5 and 10 of something, but she memorized those numbers pretty well. I'm a proud mama.

She also knows about 2/3 of the alphabet and can tell you the sounds many of those letters make, thanks to this electronic fridge magnet letter toy she has. It's pretty cool.

Other Development

I don't remember how long I thought it would take to transition from 2 naps to one, maybe a few days or a week. I was way off. It took about a month and parts of it sucked. I think that's partly why she was having so many temper tantrums. She's solidly down to one nap a day and it's finally working well for us, splits the day up nicely and we get out of the house more for fun stuff.

Anya has 13 teeth now, and the 14th is just starting to pop through.

Tantrums are a daily occurrence, mostly when nap time looms near or dinner isn't fast enough. It's not quite like it was a few weeks ago and is more or less tolerable. I hate the public ones, but whaddya do (besides hand her off to Chris or pretend you don't know who that poorly behaved child is).

Anya appears to be a leftie. She has slowly begun to show a preference for that hand, eats and draws with it. Not very surprising, since Chris writes with his left hand and I used to do some things with my left hand as a kid, but eventually started just using my right, and I'm goofy-footed.

Food

Not exactly by choice, we ended up having pizza 3 days in a row, and Anya had some too. No diaper rash. Woohoo! I'm still hesitant to give her tomato soup or a plain tomato, but this is good. I also shared a little nibble of chocolate cupcake with her and there was no reaction (I was allergic to chocolate as a kid). Strawberries seem to be OK too, at least the dehydrated ones she's tried. I still haven't tried mango with her and shellfish. That's it, though, for allergy fears.

And this is it for this month's developmental post.