The Twenty-first and Twenty-second Months

Can someone please stop time from flying so fast? In less than two months we will be celebrating Kaitlin's second birthday and I know that it will be here in no time. While it is so fun to watch her grow and get bigger, I don't want to loose my baby!

Kaitlin has been learning at such a rapid pace over the last two months. She has easily doubled her vocabulary since the last update (now has around 40 words and is learning at least one or two new words each day), knows some colors and some shapes as well. Best of all she is developing quite the little sense of humor. If I ask her to find the red square while we are playing the shapes game, she will purposely run over to the blue circle and look up at me with a little smirky smile and start laughing! She also thinks that running away from me when I try to get her in the car is funny, which I certainly do not. She also loves to "joke" around with her stuffed animals and other toys, which is so fun to watch.

Kaitlin has some exciting visitors over the last two months. Grammie (who is now "Nana") and Pop-pop ("Papa") spent a week visiting and Kaitlin could not have been happier. She warmed up to them almost immediately and definitely went through withdrawal when they left. She started saying "nana" and "papa" while they were here along with a ton of other words. And while they were here, Brian and I got to go on our FIRST vacation by ourselves - woohoo!! Kaitlin was having such a good time with her grandparents that she barely noticed that we were gone for two days! And just recently we had her Aunt Maggie in town for a visit! Talk about best friends for life - Kaitlin was instantly enamored with Maggie and fell in love with her fiance, John! She made two awesome friends in a short period of time and I know she misses them both. It is really hard for Kaitlin to say "Aunt Maggie" and when she did try to say it, it came out as "Amy" So...Maggie is now known as Amy in this house!

The last couple of months have also included a bit of resistance and rebelling from Kaitlin. She learned how to say "no" (before she would say "uh-uh") and she quickly started saying it ALL the time. We are having trouble getting her to help clean up her toys and follow directions, although that is all to be expected at this age (and probably for a while to come). Needless to say, she doesn't really like "helping me" with chores like she did in the last update! She still likes to help me "fold" laundry, but mostly so she can hoard it, not to put it away. She also had her first really bad sickness. For a while she was waking up every two weeks or so with a high temperature. At the end of February (or was it beginning of March?? The days are running away from me) she woke up practically in a panic and she was burning hot - she had a fever of 104+. I immediately gave her some Advil to get the fever down and she finally calmed down after having some water and milk. She slept on my chest for a while and we got her fever down to 101. After two trips to the pediatrician and three days with a fever they finally determined that she had an ear infection. A round of antibiotics later and she was back to normal. Though I have noticed that since that time she is REALLY clingy to me and seems to need a lot more comfort (has been sucking her thumb A LOT and wants/needs her favorite stuffed animals all the time) than usual. Hopefully it is just a phase!

I am going to try really hard to post an update at 23 months and then again at 24, but I'm not making any promises. If you would still like to read a monthly update of sorts, please check out a new project I am working on over on my business blog (Tracy Lynn Photography) - "Letters to my Daughter". Letters are posted at the end of each month :)

The Sixteenth Month

"Head, shoulders, knees and toes (knees and toes)"

That's right - Kaitlin can now find her head, toes, nose, ears, belly button and teeth. Well, most times she can. Sometimes she gets a little confused and keeps pointing to her nose when you ask her where other things are. She can also find your nose (and her bears nose, and monkeys nose, and dolls nose, and...) and she LOVES to find Mommy's belly button. Usually when we are out in public. That's cool.

(I swear I didn't know that she was wearing the same outfit in her fifteen month update. She does have more than one onesie, I promise.)

Kaitlin is turning into a very loving child and showers every stuffed animal, book and kid in sight with a million kisses and hugs. Where she used to give slobbery, open mouth kisses she now makes a kissing noise with her mouth and puckers her little lips up. She is in love with all of her stuffed animals and dolls and loves to have them all around her (either on the couch or in her crib or all over the floor). She'll go to each one, touch them on the head and give them a kiss before moving on to the next one. And dogs. Ohhh this girls love for dogs knows no boundaries. On the opposite end of the spectrum she has also turned into a shrieking, crying, screaming mess if she has to do something she doesn't want to or if you try and stop her from doing something she wants to do. Very Jekyll and Hyde over here.

Kaitlin started school this month and it has been a bit of a roller coaster. I wrote about her first day here and luckily things have drastically improved since then. The first few weeks were awful but by the fourth week she wasn't crying when I dropped her off, and was only a little upset once I came to pick her up. This past week was our best yet - she even got EXCITED as we were walking into school and I was telling her about all the fun things she was going to do (buggy ride, playing with balls - story time!!) and she didn't cry one tear when I picked her up. Success!! Hopefully it continues ;)

We are still on the teething road from hell (I say that but compared to other kids it probably isn't that bad). She has one new molar and I can see two more canines just below the gums. I am ready for teething to be over!

And can we talk about toddler eating habits please? I mean....what is the deal?! Loving a food one day, hating it the next. Acting like you are trying to give them rat poison when really it's some lovely strawberries. Kaitlin has even begun rejecting POUCHES which means she is getting barely any fruits and vegetables in her diet at all. I never thought that I would practically have to BEG my child to eat a pouch. But that is what it has come to folks. And most times she gives it a weary eye and then walks away. As of right now the only things she will eat are: quesadillas (with just cheese, or shredded yellow squash/zucchini if she can't tell it's in there), ravioli, pasta with tomato sauce, eggs (sometimes), oatmeal (sometimes), pancakes (sometimes), freeze dried strawberries (?!?!), dried apples, cheese and milk. I think that about covers it. She has not eaten a single, WHOLE piece of fruit since the beginning of August when we were up in NY. I think the most aggravating part of it is that JUST when you think you have a "safe" food that they will consistently eat they turn around and act like you are the worst person in the world to even think about offering it to them to eat. And you wonder why I drink ;)

Kaitlin has added a couple new "words" to her repertoire, which is an exciting development. She can now say - dada, yes, ah-ah (monkey noise), ar-ra-ra (dog noise), vrrmm (car noise), uh-oh, ow (for "wow"). All very exciting. She is also getting better at imitating words that you ask her to say. For instance I said to her, "Can you say 'UP'?" and she looked at me for a minute and said, "Uh". She is practically a genius ;)

We have quite the book worm on our hands too. She loves, LOVES her books. We read them morning, noon and night. She reads them on the floor, on the couch, on the chair. She would read them in the bathtub if we let her. She has about 20 favrotie books at the moment and we ready them all 49583459 times a day. We probably spend a solid 50% of our day reading books. Although it's gotten to the point where she has one or two favorite pages in each book. Often times she doesn't even want me to read the story, she just flips to the page that she likes and gives it a kiss or makes a happy face. If I try to read it she waves her arm and says, "SSHHHHH". Her teachers said that she loves to read books when she's in school too. I better get this kid to the library!

She is a running, walking, climbing (she has to climb into EVERY box she sees) ball full of energy. She's happy, emotional and energetic crazy head full of love, kisses and hugs. She can really drive me crazy but then manages to erase all of that craziness with one sweet look, one kiss out of the blue or one big, goofy smile.