18 months! Wow!

Her 18 month checkup was great. She’s hitting all expected milestones, and actually has more words than expected. At 18 months they want to see 15-20 words. She has 15-20 words plus about that many signs! We mentioned the foot dragging, since the daycare had brought it up with us, and that she trips a lot. The pediatrician watched her walk and saw her drag her toes, and said she’d grow out of it. Because it only happens sometimes, she thinks J just gets too distracted to lift her foot quite high enough. She also got her final Hep A shot, and a flu shot. The doctor finally had the preservative free shots! I’m not so worried about the thimerosol, but I hear that the preservatives may cause stronger reactions. And so if I can get the P-free shots for her, I will! And she was great. She started to cry when they poked her, but was immediately distracted by the bright orange bandaids. No tears! And now she doesn’t need any more shots until she’s 4 years old! I think next flu season she’ll be old enough for the nasal spray. Hooray! Her height, weight, and head are off the chart again, but she’s proportional and the doctor is no more worried than I am (which is to say, not at all). She’s lost a couple pounds, but it’s probably because she’s well into toddlerhood now, and can barely be bothered to sit still long enough to eat. Her height is still a bit of a mystery. I think that the datapoints showing a longer baby are more correct, just because I have been involved in the measurements for those points. Here are her charts:

head circumference at 18 months

head circumference at 18 months

length at 18 months

length at 18 months

weight at 18 months

weight at 18 months

– Some weekly update stuff. First, She slept for 8 hours straight for the first time! In her crib! Of course, she followed that with a couple nights of up and down all night. But she did it!

– Swimming is going.. swimmingly. She can now hold her breath for 10 seconds with no problem, and she can swim about 10 feet like that. 10 seconds is where they cap breath training, and start working on other things. So from now on, I’ll be wearing a shirt over my swimsuit, and when J swims to me, we’ll be teaching her self rescue skills. Which really just means pulling herself up out of the water. I’m glad I started her on swimming lessons when I did. It’s so cool and she loves it so much!

– First freckle. It actually appeared a couple weeks ago and I just kept forgetting to mention it. I try to keep a list of what’s happening each week, but I usually think of them while I’m in the shower, or lying in bed. So, I’m forgetting some other stuff that happened this week too. Meh. So many big things happen that aren’t immediately visible anyway, that we’re missing a lot of the story. At some point recently, she figured out how to pretend. Oh, and this week she started saying Mama! Which I already mentioned in a previous post. But since then, every time she sees someone, she declares them a “Mama” or a “Da-ee” and so far she’s been right every time. When did she figure out that there are two sexes and that she can differentiate?

Kids are just amazing. They learn so much, so fast, so constantly. Say or do something once and she remembers it. It’s especially showing with language.