This morning I went back and read through the last few months of my blog entries, and was sad to realize that I hadn't updated it as often as I would like. I know this is a public place and that there are those of you who read it, but I also love writing here because it is a record of things for me too. Having it be public adds a level of accountability, because if you think I don't update my blog often enough, believe me when I say I would never write in a paper journal. It helps me to know that my mom, for instance, is waiting for updates and checks my blog often to see if there are any. And, like today, I occasionally like to go back and re-read what I've written over time. There are videos and pictures and stories posted here from a year or more ago that I love going back to. They are things I might have forgotten if I hadn't written them down - and I never could have embedded videos in a paper journal. With that said, there is a lot that I haven't written down over the last month. Penny changes so rapidly, and I really want to keep a more complete record of it so that in another six months or a year, I can come back here and read about what she was like at 18 months.
Using Christmas as a jumping off point, her ability then to do shape sorting toys was good but not great. She could do the shape one that is at Tray's mom and dad's house - triangle, circle, and square, but the others she had with numbers and letters were a lot harder for her. She'd maybe eventually get it, but would often get frustrated and hand it to me and say, "Mommy do it." I started telling her to "turn it around" when she was putting a letter in the wrong way and she seemed to immediately know what that meant. Now, she will even tell herself to "turn it around" if she needs to. (On a side note, over the weekend she was kissing her stuffed animals and picked up one backwards and told it to "turn around" as she turned it around to kiss it. Ha!) She has this farm shape sorter with A, B, C, and D. She'll pick up each letter and name it saying, "A," "B," or whatever, but when my mom was visiting the weekend before last she started picking up the letters and identifying them by color too. She'd say, "orange B" before putting it in. This week she pointed to a B on a bottle and correctly identified it as a B.
In terms of books, Tray and I have both noticed that she rarely asks to read her board books anymore, but usually wants to read the paper picture books. She loooooves If You Give a Pig a Party.
At Christmas, Tray's mom and dad gave her a 20 piece Chunky World farm puzzle. I thought it would be too advanced for her because it is not a knob puzzle and the pieces can be turned over backwards so that they are the mirror image of the place they are supposed to go. Penny loves it, though, and does the puzzle 10 - 20 times a day. She puts every piece in (naming all the animals and people) and then takes them all back out (again naming everything) and puts them in a box and then starts over again. The other day she came to get me saying, "turn it around. Cow. Turn 'round." I thought maybe she had one of the cows backwards or something. She'd put in about half of the puzzle pieces (the other half were still in the box), but she'd put every one of them in backwards in exactly the same way. She did that on purpose which just blows me away. I think she did it too so that I'd come and play with her.
Also with colors, she loves her crayons and asks to "colors the paper" (which sounds very French: color zee paper. ha!) at least once a day. Also around the time of my mom's visit she started correctly identifying her crayon colors. Now she likes to tell me what color diaper I am about to put on her. I think she likes the green ones the most.
Starting at Christmas time or so, Penny began liking Cookie Monster. For a little while she attempted to call most any cartoon character in the Sesame Street and Disney genres Cookie Monster, but I think she has since more or less figured out that Cookie Monster is a specific character. She also inquires about him at least once a day.
She is continually gaining new words and making sentences of two and usually three words. At least once a day she tosses one out there with four or five and occasionally even six words, and a lot of her old "baby" ways of saying things are being replaced by the correct way of saying things. She no longer calls her bear "boo" and calls him "Misser Bear" instead. Cows no longer say "boo", but say "moo." She still calls herself Penty though. I have to admit, it's kind of growing on us. ;) She is such a parrot; she'll repeat words we say and you think she's just repeating things, but then later that day or the next day she'll use the word appropriately in context. Language acquisition is just beyond amazing. How do babies do that?
In terms of potty training, not much new on that front. Just about every night after her bath, she'll try to wriggle out of my arms saying, "need to pee-pee, need to pee-pee" and run for the "little potty" or the "big potty." Mostly though, she will pee-pee next to the potty rather than in it. Oh well, at least she knows to go in the general vicinity right? I think too that it will be better when it warms up and I won't have to worry about her being cold when she's naked and sitting on the potty.
So that's pretty much what happened between 17 and 18 months - a lot. Now that she has turned 18 months old, I can't wait to see what happens next. I am continually amazed at how babies develop into grown human beings. It is just fascinating.
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