Ages and Stages: 18 months

I can't believe you are half way through your second year of life already! I remember how far away eighteen months seemed at the beginning when I was still counting your age in weeks, and now here we are! You still say many many words, I would really guess over 200, you pretty much know all basic vocabulary. Yesterday we were listening to music and you looked at me and said, "whoa, trumpet", when a trumpet started playing in the middle of the song. I mean seriously!!! That little brain of yours! Now a days you have been entertaining us with some intense jibber-jabber as well. You just love to try and speak in sentences! Sometimes you can get out a slightly slurred "That's a bunny", "Where's daddy", and other phrases. There are also phrases you can get out almost perfectly, just recently you have learned to say "Hi, how are you" when you pretend to answer the phone. But a lot of the time, your sentences contain a mix of jibber-jabber and real words. Ex: "jiiberrerer cheerios, jibbeer eeeesh eeesh Elmo, Burt, Ernie", etc.

You love to sing songs and know some like "Twinkle Twinkle" and "Baa Baa Black Sheep" completely by yourself. You will start singing parts of songs randomly out of the blue, which is so cute to me! You have also started using names of titles of books, like "All the World", "Hop on Pop", "Llama, Llama, Red Pajama" and "Brown Bear, Brown Bear" to name a few. Plus, you will try to read some of the simple rhyming ones with me (same examples as above actually).

You know all of your basic shapes now: circle, oval, rectangle, triangle, diamond, star, heart (if those last too really count I'm not sure ha). You now know the color brown and grey as well as the others you have known for a while. You can do you chunky puzzles all by yourself, which I think is awesome :). And you have started to stack blocks by yourself, the other day you got a stack of 8 blocks all by yourself! You still LOVE to put caps on bottles and covers on containers. I'm hoping I wrote that down before since you have loved to do that for quite a few months at least. Oh and I almost forgot, you can say the ENTIRE abc's and count to ten!! Sometimes you will go even further saying "eleven, twelve, fourteen, nineteen, twenty!". There are I'm sure lots of other things I am forgetting to mention but I hope I am getting them on video!

Your hair is getting longer and you don't look very babyish anymore. You've lost most of the fat on your body (not that you had much anyway), and I can feel your little muscles in your arms and legs. You are really looking like a toddler now-a-days! The only thing that keeps you looking babyish is the fact that you are still quite petite, but you are definitely growing and look so big to mommy, daddy and the rest of our family! You are still breastfeeding and feed quite regularly (unless we are out of the house doing something fun), but I have noticed that your feedings are getting significantly shorter. It is almost as though you want to make sure they are there but then you realize you would rather be playing or exploring.

Here's to hoping the next six months go by a little slower ;)

Mom Life

Not too much out of the ordinary going on in mom world but I thought I would share that I am currently enjoying a vlog called What's Up Elle and her sister channel What's Up Moms.

Happy Valentine's Day!

DIY Magnet Projects

So I just thought I would share some DIY magnet projects I have done for my daughter. These ones were really simple to do and yet they get played with pretty much daily, win/win if I do say so myself!

1. Food photo magnets. 

I just tracked down some images of various foods via google, pasted them into a word document, added text and printed on two sheets of magnet paper that you can buy at the store. I still have the word document I made kicking around so if you are interested, feel free to email me, mommysturg@gmail.com, I'd love to share! I did mostly fruits and veggies because they were colorful and fun. I also think it is nice to get pictures with white backgrounds. As you may be able to see from the pictures, some of ours have gotten a bit crumpled over time, but that just means they are well used, ha!

2. Baby food jar lid magnets. 

Any type of jar lid would work!  But if you have a baby, chances are you might have a least a few empty baby food jars hanging around. I had a roll of magnet "tape" that I just cut up into squares and hot glued onto the back. You could put in whatever you like for pictures. I have a few pics of baby girl when she was a newborn and pictures of each of her grandparents. I also made the letters of her name by sticking letter stickers onto scrapbook paper. I would have loved to do the whole alphabet but I ran out of lids!

Ages and Stages: 17 Months

Hi baby girl you are now slightly over 17 months! I used to write a monthly update in your baby book but the spaces available only went up to 12 months, so since you have turned one year old, I have felt the need to write on here more often. Mostly because, you NEVER SLOW DOWN! You just keep learning more and more, and keep doing more and more, it is so crazy! I would probably have to do weekly updates to keep up completely, that is just not possible what with chasing you around all day :P. You still love to climb on everything, and you still really love to jump around on the bed. We have started a daily ritual of playing ring-around-the-rosie there, which you can sing basically all by yourself. You continue to sing lots and lots of songs with me (pretty much anything I sing). Twinkle Twinkle you know all by yourself, you know most of "Rain, Rain, Go Away" and "Baa Baa Black Sheep" and you are getting really close to the Whole ABC's. You will usually stop around Q and then if I say R, S you can start back up again and say the rest! You love little nursery rhymes too. At first it started with an obsession with Hey Diddle Diddle and Humpty Dumpty, which I'm sure I have wrote about (at least I hope I did), but now you really like all of them in our books and love to try to say them with me. Of course none of this is perfect English, but it is definitely recognizable! You can count to 10 with someone and you have even done it by yourself at least once. Plus you know all of "one, two, buckle my shoe..." and can say it all without any help! You also love to try say some of our shorter rhyming books when I read those, as well. For example, Dr. Suess' ABCs and All the World, which you call "All World". You are using two word phrases quite a bit now, and some three word phrases. You will also just say words with pauses in between but they are in sequence so it's like a pre-sentance. Like the other day you said "hair" "mouth" "chin" because there was a hair suck to your chin and in your mouth. Maybe I'm easily amused but, stuff like that just amazes me! You know a few more colors including pink and white, and I pretty sure you know brown now too. AND you know "square" "circle" and "triangle"! I should also mention that it is hilarious to hear you say triangle ;) Oh and by the way, Rhinoceros is another one that is quite amusing! Oh my gosh I could go on and on all day about the number of words you know, it's incredible! Definitely over 100 probably closer to 150 or more. No joke. How is all this possible before 18 months of age? I don't know, I hardly believe it myself!

We have been doing a little better on getting you to drink cow's milk, a.k.a moo-moo milk around these parts, mostly by actually mooing when you drink it (oh the dignity you loose as a parent :P). And it's looking like most of the worrying we have been doing about you starting to get pickier about food was for nothing. You have been eating meats a bit better, we started doing cottage cheese and you like that fairly well, and you have been eating cheese and yogurt like a champ again! So basically I just wish you would eat eggs again and then I wouldn't complain at all!

I think night weaning/crib sleeping are on the horizon, but I'm trying to take it slow and not pressure myself or you too much.