Eighteen Months

Last week, Alice and I went to the doctor for her 18-month checkup.  Where in the world has the time gone?

She's shy around strangers now, so when the doctor walked in, she held on to me for dear life, and when he listened to her heart with the cold stethoscope and checked her ears with the ear-checker-scope, she screamed and cried and tried to scramble all the way up and onto my head to get away.

She warmed up some when the nice doctor produced a brand new book for her to take home. Unsurprisingly, that book is now in heavy rotation, since it's just page after page of objects for her to point to. Alice makes it clear that Matt and I are to name whatever it is she points to. Overandoverandover.  This is an activity that Alice seems to find endlessly satisfying. Mom and Dad kinda' wonder, what's wrong with a little plot line or character development every now and then?

Her vocabulary is growing by leaps and bounds.  I can hear her in her crib right now, chatting herself to sleep as she exclaims, "Shoes! Shoes! Shoes!"; "Oh!"; "Apple?"; "Baby? Baby?"; "Dada! Dada?"; "Wow! Wow!"; "Bubble?" and other words that are unintelligible but no less emphatic.

Physically, she's growing as well, measuring at 34.75 inches tall and weighing 28 pounds and 14 ounces. She definitely inherited Matt's height.

She is endlessly entertaining (says her unbiased mother). Whether I'm biased or not, I swear that she's just plain good company, alternating between spunky, sweet, clever, and goofy by the minute.

Sometimes, but just sometimes, when things aren't going her way, she loses all self control and explodes. Like the time that I told her we weren't going to be drawing with markers at the neighbors house, and she reached for the first thing she could find (the page out of a magazine) and tore it apart with her teeth. Or when she couldn't figure out how to get her shoes off this morning. So she tried to bite them off.

She's only 18 months old, after all. And I can't help but laugh at those sudden bursts of emotion even while trying to help her find another way to deal with them. Maybe I'm a little empathetic because if she has Matt to thank for her height, she has me to thank for her temper (can we all agree to call it spiritedness instead?).

Maybe I'm just feeling the effects of the extra sleep that Alice's new later schedule affords me, but these last couple of weeks have just been nice.

I have a feeling that I'll be reading this post wistfully in a few weeks: if I've learned one thing as a parent so far it's that everything is a phase. But for now, I think I'll just enjoy this one.