Age: 17 months, 4 weeks

– At school/daycare, they’ve started teaching various life skills. This month, it’s how to zip zippers! J has definitely gotten the hang of it, and if she can grab the zipper pull she’s happy to zip up her coat! She also wants to zip up her sleepers at night, which have much longer, stiffer zippers with much smaller pulls. So sometimes it takes a while to get her dressed for bed. Totally worth it to see the look in her eyes when she’s done!

– Speaking of looks in her eyes, now whenever she sees a folded towel sitting out, she picks it up and brings it over to me and then goes, “He’! He’!” (using an apostrophe for a glottal stop there, and that’s a short e). I’m sure she’s saying “Help!” as in “I’m helping!” (Help, hot, and heart all sound the same, which is why they’re not on her list of words yet.) So I bring her over to the linen closet and let her put the towel away. I’ve even moved the sheets up and the towels down so she can reach where it goes. When she’s done, she always dusts her hands off. So cute!

– Her canines are definitely bothering her as they come in. Yesterday, Ms. Carrye (her primary teacher at daycare) asked me if we could bring in a pacifier clip so they could attach a teether to her. At night she’s been up more than usual and also harder to get down.

– The other night I had my first experience with her expressing as plainly as she could that she didn’t want to go to bed. Recently she’s been employing various stalling techniques: bringing us another book to read, and another, and another; refusing to put on PJ’s; spending lots and LOTS of time on our goodnights to Daddy. That sort of thing. But the other night, after we got through all that, she nursed for a while and then sat up and signed all done. Which happens sometimes, she doesn’t nurse to sleep every night. But when I continued rocking and singing to her, she got more insistent with her “all done.” Eventually she said, “bye bye!” and patted her butt like they do to put her down for naps at school. I thought she wanted to go to the bed, so I took her over to her bed and lay her down. I realized later she was trying to say bye bye to bedtime itself. Eventually I figured out that she just didn’t want to go to bed, and she was saying “all done” and “bye bye” to bedtime, her bedroom, all of it. Once I figured out what she was actually trying to communicate, I told her that it was okay to be done snuggling, but that we had to stay in the nursery because it was nightnight time. I told her that a few more times before she settled. I actually nearly caved, but right as I was starting to doubt myself, she started falling asleep.

– Tomorrow I have my first parent/teacher conference! I’m inordinately excited for it. It’s just so neat to be on the other side of all these things! Anyway, I’ve been talking to Carrye a lot recently about J. Trouble walking, trouble with being so much bigger than the other kids, trouble with teething, etc., etc. It will be interesting to see what she says when we actually have time to sit down and chat without J tugging on me to go home.

– Friday we have her 18 month well baby visit. I’ll try to update with info over the weekend, but we will be in San Antonio so I’m not sure how well it will work.