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Aug. 14th, 2006 12:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rivkaAlex turned 16 months old this week. This is really a golden time.
She's so charming, happy, funny, cuddly, independent, smart. The incredible restlessness of a couple of months ago - the constant need for entertainment and changing scenery - has settled down. Now she sits on the floor and colors with crayons for long periods of time. She talks to her doggy and her little toy Sesame Street figures. She opens junk mail. She puts her puzzles together and talks about the pieces. She climbs up on the furniture and back down again. She has phone conversations, sometimes on her toy cell phone but more often (and with greater enthusiasm) on ours: "Hi! H'lo! Hi! Phone! [babble babble] Bye!"
She's funny. Saturday at dinner, she wrapped a thin strip of mango around her wrist, grinned at us, and announced, "A watch!" Then she held it up to various incorrect body parts ("Nose!" "Ear!"), laughing and shaking her head to show that she didn't mean it, before popping it in her mouth.
She's more affectionate. When she brings me a book to read, she'll suggest, "Lap." She loves to sit on my lap to color (although that has technical complications), look at books, or watch Blue's Clues. She'll lean in to us and say, "Hug hug," or just throw herself into our arms for a quick cuddle. Toys like doggy are still the most likely to be kissed (closed lips, chin thrust forward, and an emphatic "mmmmmmMMM!"), but sometimes we get kisses as well.
She still just loves to go for walks and play outside. She collects leaves, sticks, and small rocks. She splashes in puddles. She looks up at streetlamps and says, "Tall!" She points at passing cars and announces their color. She wants to investigate every barking dog she hears. And she definitely remembers where dogs have been seen in the past - she knows approximately where to find the bookstore with the amiable collie mix, and the gates that sometimes have dogs behind them.
I've lost count of her vocabulary, but it's well over two hundred words. Her early words were almost all concrete nouns, but now she uses plenty of verbs (hop, jump, walk, drink, sleep, scratch, fly) and adjectives (high, low, tall, hot, cold, loud). She makes adorable errors: she calls umbrellas "rain" and brooms "sweep." She knows just about all the parts of the body and most of the colors (red, green, blue, yellow, purple, pink, black, brown), and she loves to point them out. Two-word phrases are increasingly common: "red truck," "cracker, please," "more milk." She loves to answer questions with "no," regardless of her actual opinion, so we have a lot of conversations like this:
Alex: "Kitty, kitty, kitty!"
Me: "Oh, is there a kitty there?"
Alex: "No."
We had her 15-month well-baby check today, a month late. It was awful - she started crying as soon as we were put in an exam room, and turned purple with hysteria during the exam itself. Her pediatrician and his assistant both agreed that it was just the age, and that pretty much every toddler hates doctors with a passion. Fortunately, this time the exam didn't bring up anything that required further investigation.
Except, possibly, her weight. She didn't gain any weight from 12 to 16 months - she's stayed steady at 21 pounds, which puts her in the 13th percentile for girls her age. Her height, on the other hand, continues to hover right around the 95th percentile. Her doctor wasn't especially alarmed - he pointed out that if she wasn't getting adequate nutrition, she wouldn't be getting taller. But he wants us to make sure to schedule her 18 month visit right at 18 months, so we can continue to monitor her weight. In the meantime, I'm going to try offering more healthy snacks - she's generally been a three meals a day toddler, rather than a grazer, but I think she could probably eat a little more in between meals. (Any suggestions for healthy, high-calorie snacks?)
In general, this is just an amazing time. She went through a hard-to-parent phase a little while back, and I'm sure she'll hit another one soon... but in the meantime, I can hardly contain my overflowing heartful of toddler love.
She's so charming, happy, funny, cuddly, independent, smart. The incredible restlessness of a couple of months ago - the constant need for entertainment and changing scenery - has settled down. Now she sits on the floor and colors with crayons for long periods of time. She talks to her doggy and her little toy Sesame Street figures. She opens junk mail. She puts her puzzles together and talks about the pieces. She climbs up on the furniture and back down again. She has phone conversations, sometimes on her toy cell phone but more often (and with greater enthusiasm) on ours: "Hi! H'lo! Hi! Phone! [babble babble] Bye!"
She's funny. Saturday at dinner, she wrapped a thin strip of mango around her wrist, grinned at us, and announced, "A watch!" Then she held it up to various incorrect body parts ("Nose!" "Ear!"), laughing and shaking her head to show that she didn't mean it, before popping it in her mouth.
She's more affectionate. When she brings me a book to read, she'll suggest, "Lap." She loves to sit on my lap to color (although that has technical complications), look at books, or watch Blue's Clues. She'll lean in to us and say, "Hug hug," or just throw herself into our arms for a quick cuddle. Toys like doggy are still the most likely to be kissed (closed lips, chin thrust forward, and an emphatic "mmmmmmMMM!"), but sometimes we get kisses as well.
She still just loves to go for walks and play outside. She collects leaves, sticks, and small rocks. She splashes in puddles. She looks up at streetlamps and says, "Tall!" She points at passing cars and announces their color. She wants to investigate every barking dog she hears. And she definitely remembers where dogs have been seen in the past - she knows approximately where to find the bookstore with the amiable collie mix, and the gates that sometimes have dogs behind them.
I've lost count of her vocabulary, but it's well over two hundred words. Her early words were almost all concrete nouns, but now she uses plenty of verbs (hop, jump, walk, drink, sleep, scratch, fly) and adjectives (high, low, tall, hot, cold, loud). She makes adorable errors: she calls umbrellas "rain" and brooms "sweep." She knows just about all the parts of the body and most of the colors (red, green, blue, yellow, purple, pink, black, brown), and she loves to point them out. Two-word phrases are increasingly common: "red truck," "cracker, please," "more milk." She loves to answer questions with "no," regardless of her actual opinion, so we have a lot of conversations like this:
Alex: "Kitty, kitty, kitty!"
Me: "Oh, is there a kitty there?"
Alex: "No."
We had her 15-month well-baby check today, a month late. It was awful - she started crying as soon as we were put in an exam room, and turned purple with hysteria during the exam itself. Her pediatrician and his assistant both agreed that it was just the age, and that pretty much every toddler hates doctors with a passion. Fortunately, this time the exam didn't bring up anything that required further investigation.
Except, possibly, her weight. She didn't gain any weight from 12 to 16 months - she's stayed steady at 21 pounds, which puts her in the 13th percentile for girls her age. Her height, on the other hand, continues to hover right around the 95th percentile. Her doctor wasn't especially alarmed - he pointed out that if she wasn't getting adequate nutrition, she wouldn't be getting taller. But he wants us to make sure to schedule her 18 month visit right at 18 months, so we can continue to monitor her weight. In the meantime, I'm going to try offering more healthy snacks - she's generally been a three meals a day toddler, rather than a grazer, but I think she could probably eat a little more in between meals. (Any suggestions for healthy, high-calorie snacks?)
In general, this is just an amazing time. She went through a hard-to-parent phase a little while back, and I'm sure she'll hit another one soon... but in the meantime, I can hardly contain my overflowing heartful of toddler love.
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Date: 2006-08-14 05:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-08-14 08:13 pm (UTC)Speaking of breadlike things, I've taken a liking to Cornell bread, which is bread made with unbleached white flour (I actually use whole wheat, which, as you'll see, is a bit of gilding the lily, nutrition-wise), and in the bottom of every measuring cup, add a tablespoon each of soy flour and dry milk, and a teaspoon of wheat germ, before filling it with flour.
It's got a better protein profile, more minerals, and more vitamins than ordinary bread. Tastewise, I think it tastes different from ordinary bread, but it's like switching from white to whole wheat... at first, you notice it because it's different. Then, you stop noticing it because you get used to it.
One warning: if you leave a somewhat under-risen loaf of it out on your counter, figuring it'll just get a bit stale, and, hey, stale bread toasts just fine, you can end up with a rock that you'd need to soak in water before throwing out for the birds. And you have to throw it out for the birds (or throw it away) because you'd be afraid of using the very good knives that have developed a taste for human flesh on it, because it becomes that hard to cut, and, well, those knives have that taste for human flesh, and...
Okay, you asked for food hints, not strange trivia that sounds like something out of a Stephen King short story. I'll stop now.