March 2nd – 18 months old!!

Dear Landen,

You are now officially a year-and-a half old.  That’s absolutely crazy!  From this point forward you’re closer to being 2 than 1.  Whoa!!

We’ve been working on teaching you different body parts and now you can point to your mouth and your feet in addition to the other ones you knew.  You catch onto them so quickly now.  If we ask you where the ball is and you don’t know, you’ll put your arms up in an “I don’t know” motion.  You’ve started covering your ears when we’re somewhere noisy like a restaurant.  You especially love it when we cover our ears too.  You love to spin around and around in circles and then stop and feel the wooziness.  Luckily you haven’t taken a tumble doing that!  Walking backwards is also a new trick.  In the middle of the month you turned the doorknob to get into the bathroom but it hasn’t happened again so it may have been a lucky fluke.  If not, we’re going to have to do some more child-proofing!  Mommy was so impressed one day at lunch when she gave you a bowl of corn kernels and you were able to feed them to yourself using a baby fork!!  You love to eat freeze-dried fruit now but only if we tell you it’s a cracker.  Daddy taught you to satisfactorily says “ahhhhhhhh” after taking a drink so you do that quite often now.

You are very shy around people you don’t know, but you’re always willing to give someone a high 5.  When we tell you say bye bye you always blow a kiss, no matter who it is.  When shopping with Mommy at Michael’s you picked up a wooden stamp out of a bin and stamped your shoe with it – just like the tumbling teacher does on your feet each week.  We thought that was so smart of you!!  Whenever we cross a street or walk through a parking lot we say “run run run!” and you take off (while holding our hand).  You LOVE it.

You’ve become quite the little helper around the house.  You’ve learned how to throw away the newspaper and a plastic bag in the recycling can.  We have to keep an eye on it though because you’ve put other things in there too.  One of your favorite things is to “clean” with a dry sponge or baby wipes.  You like to help Mommy fill and carry the laundry basket from the laundry room to the bedroom.  And you move the kitchen stool around from place to place in the kitchen so you can get access to the kitchen counter.

You’ve added a couple more words to your speaking vocabulary and they all sound very similar to one another.  Apple = “bapple”, water = “bahble”, and bottle = “bobble”.  We really have to pay attention to know what you’re referring to!  At the beginning of this past month you had your first speech therapy appointment.  You cried in the beginning when the therapist, Karen, wanted you to sit in a chair but Mommy sat next to you for reassurance.  You had to sit for over 30 minutes, which we think is a bit long, but you did well.  Afterwards it was snack time and you had 2 mini Oreo cookie pieces.  It was your very first Oreo and man did you love it!!  We’ll keep going to speech once a week and move it up to twice a week eventually when they can fit you in.  Unfortunately, one of your friends at speech was sick one day and you came down with it a few days later.  You had a cough and runny nose.  When you cough hard you rub your chest so we knew it hurt.  You even threw up once!!  Being sick is no fun.

We love that you’re making some progress both in what you understand and what you’re able to say.  We hope that next month brings even more progress!  We love you!