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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: 2006-08-15 02:29 pm (UTC)I bought a Snack Trap recently, which I'm starting to think is the best toddler invention ever. It facilitates grazing and self-feeding without getting Cheerios all over the living room (except, of course, when she pulls out handfuls and starts deliberately dropping them on the floor. Nothing can truly prevent a toddler from making a mess :)).
We're big fans of fatty things spread on bread and cut into bite-size pieces - hummus, guacamole, olive oil, pesto (K had some before we got the "absolutely no dairy" edict; I'm currently working on a dairy-free recipe). Since dairy isn't a problem for Alex, you could try cream cheese as well.
Of course, I'm not sure I'm the best person to give anyone advice on fattening up their child. K weighed in at twenty pounds, four ounces at her most recent doctor's visit, and I'm a little afraid to see where that lies on the growth charts. I just keep looking at her 6-foot, 145 pound father and hoping this is all genetics.
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Date: 2006-08-15 08:04 pm (UTC)