18 months

Anya is 18 months old today. This morning she had her well-child visit at the doctor. All is as it should be. The doctor said to start giving her more timeouts when she misbehaves and that tantrums will continue to increase. Joy. Stats:

weight: 24 pounds, 9 oz (50th percentile)
height: 32 inches (50-75th percentile)

Locomotion

I enrolled Anya at The Little Gym. She's one of the oldest in her class and is a bit of a show-off, completing the obstacle courses with ease and swinging on the bars. She absolutely loves going, which isn't a surprise, since climbing and running around are pretty much her favorite things to do. She's not so fond of the balance beam right now (refuses to stand on it if there are no support rails to hold onto and just me to assist her. I can't say I blame her!), but loves everything else, especially the bars. Next month she moves into a new age group and will be the youngest in the class, so it will be more challenging. My hope is that this class will be a good outlet for her monkey tendencies and she'll be less inclined to climb on things at home. A mom can dream, right?

Speech

This has been a month of sentences. I'd say she predominantly expresses herself with multiple words now (and since it's such a developmental leap, I think it's why she's been waking up at night a lot this month). She has also been experimenting with language, using pronouns, possessives, and plurals. Also taking words and adding -ing to them, often correctly, sometimes not. Example, she hears a dog bark. "Doggie woofing!" And, one that I thought was cute from the other day: we've been teaching her to say please when she wants something. She said please then paused and said "mama, I pleasing".

She now recites the numbers 1-10 when she's in the mood, as well as sings (way off key :-) ) do-re-mi-fa-so-la-ti-do, and sings "twinkle twinkle little star" and bits of other songs we sing often.

Other Development

Mainly just language comes to mind for the last month. She is currently going through a growth spurt and has packed on almost a pound since she had that weird fever almost a month ago. Her stomach has been a bottomless pit the last few days. For example, yesterday's lunch:

-1 quesadilla (1 tortilla folded in half style)
-2 full size fish sticks
- A handful of peas
- 1/4 an apple

Food

This will probably be the last time I have this header for the monthly write ups, since I don't foresee any major changes with eating. She is pretty good with using utensils lately. To the point where she can eat a bowl of yogurt or soup and get 85% of it into her mouth and not on her bib/everywhere else.