Eighteen Months Old

Happy Half Birthday, my boy!

Yep, Ace is eighteen months old and is thriving more than ever.

He is adding to his vocabulary every day. In addition to the ones he's said in this post he has added (that I can remember):

foook (fish), park, horse, frog, fooose (shoes), noodle, broco (broccoli), coocoo (cookie), cahker (cracker), puc (cup), pap (clap), hep (help), knife, fork, spoon, knock, bebe bear (baby bear), ring, rain, moon, gas (grass), coke (coat), buckle

He loves to read and his reading patience has expanded. His current favorite (this week) is Brown Bear, Brown Bear What Do You See? The other night he sat through the entire Butter Battle Book and if you're familiar with the Suessical delight you know it is one of his more lengthy reads. I was impressed. It's rare we make it through a 5-6pg book but that book is 35 pages of text and there are way more than five words per page.

He had his second visit to the dentist today (look for a full report tomorrow!) and for the most part he loved it. He now has 12 teeth including 4 molars! Time to start chewing that food for real now! Speaking of chewing Ace continues to eat like a bird 70% of the time. But he's still running around with plenty of energy and is quite happy to eat whenever he wants to. He has been exposed to M&Ms and he is a fan. Every now and again I will give him a couple - and we use them to count. He's gotten as high as three. :)

Sleep continues to escape us. We've recently switched to the bottle only in the night - and only allowing 'Mama Milk' after 7am (when it is light outside.) We're on night 4 of that - and the last 3 nights in the first stint of sleep he's had 6.5 hours of unbroken sleep, then 4.5 before the cat jumped on him and woke him up, and then last night he got 5.5 hours before he crawled into bed with us. Granted once he did climb into bed last night (at 2:30am) sleep from there on was broken and miserable... so it's a slow go to true success. However in this last month - he did have giant success in that department..

Ace continues to love the movies Toy Story, Cars, and Finding Nemo - although for the most part he cycles between Cars and Toy Story, we don't watch them every day but at least a couple of times a week. He also knows how to turn the tv on and change the channels until he finds a cartoon... or whatever it is that he wants to watch! And NO we did not show him how to do this, he obviously observed us doing it but we never walked him through the steps. He also can change the tuner (?) on the tv from the tv to the dvd 'channel' and then turn the PS2 on and hits the correct button on the controller to make his dvd go. It's frightening how good he is at it.

He loves playing with his toys and his current favorite are his trucks! He has figured out how to push them around on the floor and is having a great time. He loves his kitchen stuff and has even started to 'help' unload the dishwasher. Often we hand him the tupperware and he puts that away. Other times we allow him to put the silverware away - which always starts out helpful and often ends up a giant pile of silverware mounding up in the drawer - which we of course fix after he's all done helping. We don't want to discourage him, so we show him at the beginning how to do it and then after he gets started we try not to nit-pick or correct his methods. He also loves to help cook whenever he can and has a great time helping.

Ace had yet another haircut this month - that makes number 4! I suppose one day I'll stop counting, but not just yet - every one feels like another milestone and symbol of my baby rapidly escaping my grasp. He's started to say 'All done, mama' siiiigh - sometimes he is done with something and just telling me ... other times he's all done with momma. Siiigh.

He's our joy. He's doing so well and it's been a wonderful eighteen months! It doesn't seem like it's been that long - but it has. He's doing great and I love to hear him develop more vocabulary and actually talk with us. Happy Half Birthday, Baby Bear!