Jade grows up- 18 months

A week ago (the 28th), Jade was 18 months old. How did this happen? It's amazing to me how much she changes every day. I don't feel like it happens that quickly and then I look at pictures and it's like she's not even the same person. It's crazy.

First, her stats:

Weight: 19 pounds, 3 ounces- right below the charts

Height- 30 inches- 10th percentile!

Head circumference- 50% percentile

The huge growth spurt in her height (2 inches in 3 months) explains why her 9 months pants fit one day and were highwaters the next. She is wearing 9-12 months in most brands and 12-18 in Old Navy and a few other places. Her size 3 shoes still fit, although she's also wearing a size 4 (I wanted them to last all winter) and they're not too huge on her. They would have liked to see more weight gain (big surprise) but she had a stomach virus earlier this month and they were actually impressed by how much she had gained since then, so that's good.

Helping daddy work in the yard.

She is doing so many new things this month. Her vocabulary has expanded infinitely. She now says "thank you" (sometimes even in the right context), "cow/moo", "cat", "hot", "bed", "up", "sock" and many more that I'm probably forgetting. Sometimes instead of "dada", she actually says "daddy" and she's called me "mommy" a few times as well. I'm trying to teach her "please". Right now, if she wants to be picked up, she holds up her arms and says "up, up, up" insistently until I pick her up. I'm working on "up, please". We'll see when that happens :)

Going down a HUGE slide. She loved it :)

I'd say this is probably the most reading we've done with her since she was an infant. Her attention span is getting a bit longer and if we let her, we'd read 15 books at bedtime every night. So we read A LOT throughout the day, which I love. She's still picky about what we read and it's not uncommon to get halfway through a book and have her close it and go get another one, but I'm glad that she's so interested in reading. We've started checking books out of the library, which has been nice for me because I do get sick of reading the same book over and over and over. She really likes most anything by Dr Suess- his ABC book probably being her favorite. She also loves "Oh the thinks you can think" and a book called "Baby Looks" from the 1970s that was my sisters. "Are you my mother?" (also a hand-me-down from my parents) is another consistent hit.

Checking out her baby doll's belly button.

Her eating is back to being extremely frustrating, but I'm trying not to let it get to me too much. I truly don't understand how she could love something one day and throw it at me two days later. She has started to pitch fits when we try to put her in her highchair if she doesn't like what's on her tray. Eating out, as I'm sure you can imagine, has become increasingly difficult. I'm working on finding the balance between "you eat what I give you or you don't eat" and making sure that she eats something. Since she is so little, I hate to be really strict with it but I also don't want to set myself up for failure by giving her what she wants all the time. 

She knows all of her body parts and finds it extremely fun to point them out on all of her stuffed animals and other people. She now says most of them very clearly as well: eye, mouth, nose, and ear are all easy to understand. Belly button is still "baba". She can say foot fairly well and point out anything that we ask (knee, toes, etc).

She likes to get dirty.

We recently went to a petting zoo and she was fascinated with all the smaller animals: ducks, rabbits, turtles, etc. The big animals TOTALLY freaked her out. Even after I pointed out that she loves cows in books and loves to say moo, she would start to spaz if I tried to walk closer to the cows. Oh well, we'll go back and I'm sure she'll grow out of it eventually :)

She can now climb onto our dining room chairs, open drawers and pull stuff (that she cannot see) out and climb up and down the stairs with such proficiency that she sometimes is on the different level of the house than me and I had no clue. She's definitely getting into a destructive phase and I think we're about to have to start babyproofing more than we ever did because cleaning up after her is exhausting and she often gets into things she shouldn't be playing with.

This month has been a lot of fun. Challenging, but fun :) She is learning so much every day and it's exciting just to watch her little brain work.

This will probably be the last "Jade grows up" post because I might have a new baby in the house before she's 19 months old and I think 18 months is a decent stopping point.

What I currently see when she wants "up". A huge belly with a head poking out.