Anna's 17th Month

Anna is seventeen months old!

Ever since that one day hanging out with her friend who is six months older than she, Anna has been trying so hard to get the hang of running.  She's also been practicing walking on her toes.

We got outside as much as we could this fall before the weather turned kinda miserable.

Man, I wish jacket season were just a little longer.

She has got the number 2 down pat.

It is, in fact, a multipurpose number that can represent all numbers as well as the act of counting.  But in the second half of the month, she started counting all the way up to FOUR! Minus the number one.  I dunno why, but it's always "Two, Free, Four, Two, Two, Two, Free," etc. Occasionally, she says what definitely sounds like five, six, seven, and eight, in correct order, no less.  Counting has been exciting this month.

She's been mimicking a few of our phrases like Oh boy! and I'll be riiiiiiight back! with a dramatic finger waggle.  It's pretty darn cute.

It's wonderful how much her play has developed in the last month.  Here she is "feeding" her baby.

She's also learning to color without eating the crayons (as much).

She can now climb onto most things chair height.

The couch is a challenge, but the window bench is a piece of cake.  We're moments away from her being able to operate the door handles and being able to let herself upstairs.

Anna likes practicing with real cups.  I'll sometimes give her a couple tablespoonfuls of water.  When she's concentrating, she does really well, but the rest inevitable ends up on the floor.

Reading was the thing this month.

Every book, every day, some books multiple times a day.  She looooves her Cookie Monster shapes book.  She got circle a while ago, but she's got star now, too.  She can identify the sun in any picture (if it's not too busy) and she knows the lion and bear.  She can do most parts of the face.

Oh! And it was Halloween last month.

I'm so excited for the holiday season this year!  I love Anna's sparkling laugh and adorable sense of humor, and I can't wait to see what she thinks of the house all in lights and the fun and pretty decorations going up all over town.

Anna, what a dear little person you're turning out to be!  We love you so very, very much.

Anna's 16th Month

So many words this month!

Anna has tried so many new words every day this month that I could not possibly remember each one.  Circle was a big one, and now she likes to point out the circles she sees around the room on her toys, her eating tray, her cup.  She likes the chunky Melissa and Doug puzzle with the shapes on it, circle, square, rectangle, etc.

Dave has been working with her on making all the sounds of the alphabet, and she's game for trying most of them whenever he asks.  I love the way she says Where go? O! There it is!  She says it so that it always sounds vaguely like it, he, or she and always sounds recognizable and correct.

If you are looking at a book with her and ask her Where's the ball? she will say There it is! without pointing at anything.  We're also working on Please and Thank you! She'll often say please without prompting, but she usually needs a reminder for thank you.

Packet is another one that I just love to hear her say.  She loves puree packets (which I'm pretty sure are mostly apple sauce + maybe a tablespoon of broccoli/spinach/whatever else is supposed to be in there).  So when she says packet? her sweet baby voice has this heartbreaking hope in it that I fall for every time.

She's been practicing the sign language from her Baby Einstein video, too, just rattling off words and their signs randomly.

I know this is blurry.  Sorry, folks.

There is no convincing her that my name is Mommy...she will hear us say it and watch us use the sign language for it, and then insistently say and sign Dadda and point at me.

She absolutely loves to be tossed and flipped and hang upside down and spin in circles.  This is a good game I like to call "Rag Doll Anna."  Ye faint of heart, dare not watch this:

The blood lead level test last month was so-so news...better than before (trending downward, yea!), but still over 5 (the current cut-off for elevated anxiety...it used to be 10 or higher, depending where you lived).  So we're trying to follow the stringent cleaning regimen they prescribe, but I honestly don't believe it's helping.  There's just too much leftover construction dust from when we gutted the house.  I'm going to try to get her out of the house more this winter; hopefully with the colder weather we won't have as much car sickness 🙏

She's been playing games of pretend this month which has been super cool to watch.  She plays with my beaded cuff bracelet by pretending to pinch off the beads and feed them to me.

Holding a cup for us to pretend to drink is another fun game.  She's also been reading to herself a lot this month (and reading with grown-ups a little less often).

And this month has been a back-and-forth between heavy Stranger Anxiety and panic when Mommy tries to leave her in the church nursery and Friendliest Baby You Ever Met in Public with a big smile and an enthusiastic wave for every person on earth.  We took her to the restaurant with us for dinner on our anniversary, and the kitchen staff came out to see her because apparently the whole restaurant was talking about that cute baby in the pink dress that you just had to go see.

She can solidly climb up the stairs by herself (and into her learning tower)...

...and after one pretty rough misstep, she's solid going down the steps independently, too.

This is the learning tower, btw.  The bottom step slides in for a more compact storage profile, but we actually just leave it out all the time.

There's a new tooth bottom right, and its mirror on the bottom is juuuust poking through.

It is so nice that she can communicate when she's hungry now...but also we don't want her learning that she can skip meals and eat snacks whenever she wants...so I'm trying to implement a breakfast/lunch/snack/dinner routine without letting her munch in between.

And even though I'm definitely in control of the fridge and pantry, it's surprisingly hard to stop the munchies!  Especially if I'm feeling munchy myself (which is a good incentive to stop skipping meals!).

In other news, this month saw a big cold snap that never went away.  We were 80+ degrees one day and literally down thirty degrees the next...and it's looking like it's not going to go back up.  I don't generally post here about my projects anymore, but a friend put a bee in my bonnet about the landscaping I've been planning in my head since before Anna was born.  With no fence to keep a little one off the street and the vast bulk of the yard being a steep hill that isn't conducive to toddler tottle, I had been wanting to install a sort of hedgerow along our frontage.  It will be seen from the house, so I wanted something that would look beautiful and inviting as well as acting as an impenetrable wall to wandering little feet (and curious motorists).  So I did.

That's about 60 feet of garden right there!

I wish you could see it the way I see it in my head already: mature, tall, lush, and graceful.  In a few years, it will be (hopefully) all filled in.

This part on the end is currently buried in mulch, but these two stone sofa chairs are actually pretty comfortable and provide a nice view of the playset.  They look bare now, but soon they will be shaded by maiden grass, witch hazel, and beautyberry bushes (which repel mosquitoes!).  I'm hoping to spend a good bit of next summer here.

And while I was at it, I tilled, fertilized, and replanted the two beds by the house because they have looked sad and pitiful ever since we've known them.

Again, they will look better in the spring and much much better in a couple of years.  And next spring may finally be the end of this garden that we inherited:

It still has several back-breaker boulders in it that I wasn't able to get to this season, and under all the vegetation lies about three inches of soil on top of three layers of thick plastic for some reason.  I don't know how that holly bush has survived this long in only three inches of soil, but I intend to transplant it and all the other salvageable plants next spring and reseed this space in grass.  And then there won't be a huge obstacle in the way of the swingset.  For now, I'm using it to store extra mulch for a few more projects I'm planning to do before the snow flies.

Project detour over. Back to monthly photo.

Oh man, I'm loving this season with her!  She's really starting to communicate, and she's so much fun to play with, read to, and hang out with.  What a great little kid she is!  Anna, we loved you so much already and somehow we love you so much more day by day as we get to know you and your personality shines out.  You are a treasure and a joy!

Anna's 15th Month

This month really flew by, as the end of the summer tends to do.

We've been trying to make the most of our beautiful summery weather by playing outside as much as we can.

This is complicated by the bounteous wasp population in our backyard, drawn by the ripening apples (as is a sweet little toddler I am trying really hard to keep from getting stung).

Handing me dirt and rocks; a great pastime 

Anna really wants to be able to throw and catch a ball (ball-ball) the way we do, so she often holds it up behind her head while she toddles across the house and then sets it down with a satisfied Hetch! as if she had thrown it all that way and was now catching it.

She likes when we place fetch with Monkey, too...Monkey chases his toy, brings it halfway back, then she picks it up and hands it to us to throw again.  It's a pretty good system.

This month Anna has been captivated by all things baby...

...pictures of babies, her best baby doll (as well as most other stuffed animals which are also now baby), and...her legs?  I dunno, whenever she's on the changing table and her legs are waving around above her head, she points at her own knees and feet and says Baby!

She's gotten pretty good at putting twist caps on bottles and baby food pouches and giving them a good twist.

(We haven't figured this one out) She has this phrase she says: O! Dee-dee!

It's sometimes used like woops or sometimes like oh hey, look at that and she uses it when she drops something or realizes something about the thing in her hand or notices something she hadn't noticed before.

Or when she's on the changing table.
The dee-dee is said to the tune of uh-oh. Cute but kind of baffling.

She has added the recognizable words cup, bottle (baa), hug, car, and flower (sounds like fie-ee) to her vocabulary this month.  She's begun signing drink, too, though it's a two-handed, walrus-tusk-looking motion instead of the normal cup drinking motion.  She also signs potty since a few of her books have pictures of baby potties.  She can do a kitty's meow, a puppy's bark, and a lion's roar, but she doesn't do any other animals yet.

That's the learning tower in all its unfinished glory

She keeps trying to use the voice commands on the Echo to get it to play music because she loves to dance and sing.

The fourth tooth on the bottom front has erupted, but it's stagnated as a little bitty stump.

I'm not sure how she eats all the things she does, but nothing really slows her down, despite lack of equipment.  You know, except obstinance.

All dried fruit are favorites now, including prunes, raisins, figs, and apricots, but blackberries remain the all-time best favorite.

There is so much I am forgetting here.  But the end of this month hit me kind of hard for some reason...maybe it was the transition (finally) down to one nap and the new daily marathon of let's just get to lunch time.

Maybe it's all the time we've been spending outside and trying to keep Anna from eating all the dirt, getting stung, stepping on chestnut spike-balls, rolling in poison ivy, or running into the street.

Maybe it was the repeat of the blood lead level test I've been psyching up for for the last three months (results not yet in).

I dunno, but I've been feeling zapped lately.

Please don't tell me it doesn't get better.  I mean, I know it doesn't, but hearing it certainly doesn't help. Encouragement welcome.

Anna gets more beautiful and personality-y every single day.

I love her so dearly, and Dave adores her.  We are blessed and lucky to have such a great kid.