17-month update

On August 11, Layla will be 17 months. Wow!!

Here is an update:

Eating and growing: she is growing like a weed (esp in the last two weeks, she is now as tall as almost all the older boys in her baby group!) but somehow she is eating less, or at at least it seems like it - she has become pretty picky the last two months and went from eating and loving everything to carefully tasting (she sticks her tongue out to taste) and then choosing only the stuff that suits her. It's not a diverse range but it is mostly healthy stuff, like almost all fruit, peas and some other veggies, eggs, and almost anything with pasta. So, it's not so bad. But, we've started making a lot of separate meals for her to try to get her to eat more, especially if she's not eating much because she doesn't feel very well.

Talking and interacting: she's got a lot of words down now, including apple, bike, ball, car, whoa!, mine, book, eye, nose, mouth (and pointing at the parts), Layla (Yay-ya!), and she can associate animal sounds with dog ('woof! woof!), cow (moo!) and she's almost got duck (ga! ga!). She's still working on a lot of consonant sounds like "L", "S", "T", and there are a lot of words and phrases that pop out that she doesn't repeat regularly (like 'hey you guys!' 'who's that?' and 'help please!'). She can understand a LOT and I keep reminding myself to make sure to explain things to her and be careful what words I use now - she's paying close attention!

Mobility: She's almost running now, and has really gotten into CLIMBING - she climbs up everything including the jungle gym at the playground, our book cases and dressers, kitchen chairs, and anything lying around. So far she has had only had a few big falls including one from a chair that was kind of scary. She climbs boldly higher and higher though and has been giving us mini-heart attacks on a regular basis.

Favorite activities: Layla still LOVES daycare and wears herself out completely every day she's there. She has developed a great relationship with each of her teachers and even knows the teachers of the other classes so I suspect she's become quite a social butterfly there. Outside of daycare she likes everything we do as long as we keep doing different things throughout the day - our house gets way boring by about 10 am. So we spend a lot of our weekends going to park playgrounds and various social events with other kids, farmer's markets, playing with the neighbor kids, a little shopping here and there, a zoo or aquarium trip now and then, and lots of time in the backyard. Fortunately that's all pretty easy since it's so nice outside right now. The winter will be a whole new game though - and we're already starting to brainstorm some ideas for indoor fun for our little Adventurer when it gets dark and cold out.