18 Months

I have been meaning to get Mally’s 18 month stats up here and I guess now is better then never.  : )  To go with her stats I’m posting pictures of her in her first snow outing!  Little baby kids in snow suits!  I can’t get enough.  I just giggle and giggle the whole time!  She can’t hardly walk – she waddles.  It probably doesn’t help that this snow suit is way too big for her – but it was Ellyn’s.  She had a blast in the snow and even though her mittens were soaked and her cheeks red she still did not want to come inside.

~ Talking!  We are amazed at how much she says these days.  I think she talks pretty clear – but then again I am with her 24/7 so I may just be use to her and know what she means.  She just recently started saying two words together.  She says “Daddy Home” (with great excitement) when Jesse comes home for lunch.

~ Repeating!  Along with talking comes repeating everything we say.  I mean everything.  The other day I was changing a very messy diaper and things were not going well and I swore.  I don’t use language like that – but for some reason since I have been pregnant the curse words fly out of my mouth!  I said $hit… Mally says $hit clear as day!  I gasped!  I didn’t think she was paying attention she was reading her book.  Thankfully she hasn’t said it again. 

~ She knows her name is Mally.  One day during lunch she kept pointing at me and saying “momma”.  So I pointed at her and said Mallory.  I think she knew her name was Mally – but now you can ask her what her name is and she says “Maaally”.

~ She no longer calls Maggie “Maaay”.  I loved that she called Maggie – May!  She now calls her Maggie and has to say “Hi Maggie” when she sees her.

~ Telephone.  She loves the telephone.  We gave her an old cell phone that we can actually turn on and she can push buttons and it makes noise and it also plays music.  Just yesterday we found out that you can record recordings on it – so we recorded Twinkle Little Star, B-I-N-G-O, and counting.  So now she walks around playing those songs and I have to hear myself singing – not pleasant!  Anyway, she talks on that phone all day long!  It is so funny!  She’ll grab the phone – look at it – put it up to her ear – and walk around the house talking.  Or she will go sit in her chair and talk away.  The last couple of days she has been talking to Grandma when we ask her.  I never know which Grandma she is talking to, but one day I asked her what Grandma was saying and Mally says “woof”.  I start laughing so hard.  I think she was talking to Grandma Mary that day because the other Grandma would not be talking about puppies!  LOL!  Grandma Mary is the animal lover and would totally talk puppies with Mally.  Another funny thing she does when talking on the phone is pretend to laugh.  She fake laughs and then says bye.  Hahahahahaha.Bye.

~ She still loves her books and we read tons!  I am amazed at how much she pays attention while you read.  One day I yawned in the middle of the book (it is a very boring book) and the page I was on I was going to say “shoo” and Mally starts waving her hand saying “shoo.  shoo.  shoo.”  She knew what was coming up next!  She will also read books on her own – she’ll sit down with them and read away and sometimes you will hear words that are actually in the book.  If you ask her to get a certain book she will go get that exact book you asked for and bring it to you.  We also have this daily bible book (for when she gets way bigger) but she loves to sit and look at the book and turn all the pages.  She calls that book “heavy book”.  : )

~ Puzzles!  She likes to do the wooden puzzles.  I didn’t know that she would be ready for puzzles – but she loves to sit down and do puzzles and she is good at them.  My Mom sent some new puzzles home with us (ones she hadn’t done before) and she sat down and did them without me helping her first!

~ The Moon!  I don’t really remember teaching her about the moon – but she is always asking about the moon.  Even during the day she will ask to be picked up to look out the window at the moon.  I tell her the moon is sleeping and she’ll say “moon sleepy” or “moon ni-night”.  She will find moons in her books.  One day was standing at her toy box yelling about a moon.  I asked her to bring me the moon and she had a little book with a crescent shape and she was pointing to it saying moon.

~ Circles.  She knows what a circle is and finds them everywhere and in everything.  Places you didn’t even know circles existed.  We were in the bathroom brushing our teeth (she sits on the counter while we brush our teeth) and she points the counter and says circle… sure enough!  There was a tooth paste mark on the counter in the shape of a circle.  When coloring with her she will ask you to draw circles over and over again.

~ Color.  She really likes to color and for some reason I leave the colors out for her to color.  So when FreyMoto phone rings and I have to run downstairs and help a customer for a few minutes… I will come back to her coloring on her baby gate!!  One day when we were reading a library book – I discovered she had colored in the book!!  Then Jesse left a carpenter pencil (the flat ones) in his nightstand drawer (he leaves her all kinds of bad treasures in his drawer and she knows it) and I found her coloring on the bathroom wall with it.  I, on the other hand, have nothing in my nightstand drawer and Mally colored in my drawer with the pencil too.  And the bad part of this all is I know she has the crayon or pencil in her hand, but I’m just not watching her and keep doing my thing.  And then I’ll be like – hmm… I hear scribbling… Mally is kind of quiet… MALLORY!  NO!  One time she was even sitting on my lap at the kitchen table with a pen and paper and we had an insurance guy over and I was listening to him and not paying attention – she was coloring (with pen) on the table!  Thankfully – None of this stuff is any sort of prized possession or valuable.  I mean the bathroom has wallpaper from the 70s and honestly it looks much better with Mally scribbles on it.  And my kitchen table is a garage sale trash to treasure that my Mom did for us – and I love that table and I have a friend who tries to steal it – but another coat of white paint and it would be like “new”.  ; )

~  She is starting to take interest in the pottie.  Which is very exciting to me – however she doesn’t fully understand it yet.  I have heard many people say you can’t force pottie-training – so I’m just being patient and letting her explore and get use to it.  But I also have hopes that maybe she will be trained before she is two and maybe before baby2 shows up… maybe… I’ve got 4 months…