15 months

Although Cate’s 15-month birthday is today, her well-baby checkup was actually last week. We found out that she’s dropped from the 95th percentile for height and weight to the 75-90% range. Which makes sense, now that she’s walking, she’s not gaining weight at quite the same speed anymore. And it’s fine with me if her growth wants to slow down too, since she seems so tall to me all of a sudden. (Stop outgrowing your clothes, child! Mommy and Daddy are on a budget!)

As for her milestones this month:
* She’s trying so hard to talk. She’s got all of these babbly sounds, and she puts inflections on them that are obviously mimicking us. Sometimes her voice will go up at the end like she’s asking a question, sometimes she’ll start quietly and end on a SCREEEAM like I do when I’m being dramatic, and sometimes she just sort of quietly mumbles in a sing-songy way like Dave. She’s got a few words down, but I’m waiting for her to go from her little handful of words to full sentences at some point. Oh, and speaking of words…

* She knows “no”. I first learned this from Patsy – apparently Mason tried to hug Cate a couple of times, and when he got too close, she smacked him and said “NO!!” Which, wow. Girl knows how to ward off the unwanted advances, eh? But she says it all the time now, and she even shakes her head when she says it. A lot of times I’ll offer her something – a toy, a snack, whatever – and if she doesn’t want it, she’ll smack it away and yell, “no!” Kind of rude, but ok, point taken. She also says “yeah,” but I don’t think she really knows what it means.

* She’s trying to run. Mostly she’ll only attempt this upstairs, where it’s carpeted and a bit softer. But it’s so funny because she looks sort of like an iguana or a baby T-Rex or something. Her little arms flail in the air and she’s all bowlegged with her butt stuck out. It is HIGH-larious, but since she generally only does it during Naked Time, those are not videos that I’ll be putting online.

* At some point when we weren’t paying attention, she went ahead and sprouted two more teeth. I just noticed it yesterday – Dave was holding her in his lap and I was sitting on the floor, and when she laughed I saw the roof of her mouth. And what do you know, there were a couple of new nubbies up there! So that brings our grand total up to seven: four on top and three on the bottom. (I’m still wondering where that fourth bottom tooth is. It made a brief appearance, her gums swelled up, the tooth went back in, and it hasn’t returned since.)

* The big one… drumroll please… Girlfriend is weaned. No more bottles. At all. I was scared to write about this for fear of jinxing it, but it’s been going on for almost a week now, so I think we’re safe. This is huge because I was working on it for ages. But every time she got a cold, she would regress and only want the bottle, not a cup. (Which I understand – you’re sick, you don’t feel well, you want the thing that’s familiar & comforting.) And since she was getting sick about once a month, we were constantly in this endless loop of cutting down and then going back to the bottle almost exclusively.

This time, after the whole asthma/hospital episode, I got her down to just one bottle in the morning and one right before bed. During the day, if she wanted milk, she had to drink it from a cup. Then I switched the morning bottle to a sippy cup, but I didn’t change anything else – we still snuggled on the couch and watched cartoons, and she didn’t even really seem to notice the difference. After we did that for about a week, I did the same with her nighttime bottle. I am honestly amazed at how easily she took to it, and it makes me wonder if it was sort of like her sleeping through the night thing, where she was ready for the transition a long time ago, and it just took her boneheaded mommy a while to catch on.

I cannot tell you how happy I am about that one, because I hate washing baby bottles, and it is so much easier to just toss a sippy cup in the dishwasher. And yeah, ok, there is a little bit of a “wow, she really isn’t a baby anymore” twinge that goes with it, but mostly I’m just super-excited, because have I mentioned how much fun toddlers are? Oh my god, they are SO! MUCH! FUN!

I mean, yeah ok, there are the tantrums and the full-on screaming meltdowns, but the laughter and the game-playing and all of the fun stuff more than makes up for it. Sometime in the last couple of days, Dave and I learned that if we sit on the floor and hold our arms out toward her, she’ll run to us and collapse on our chest for a big bear hug. And oh my lord, it is so cute that I just want to eat her up with a spoon.

say cheese!

Seriously, can you blame me?

3 thoughts on “15 months

  1. How wonderful for you! It sounds like C-baby really is becoming a toddler. Please give me more details on how you weaned her. We will want to start sometime after her first birthday, especially since my Miss C is going to be in the child care facility and I think that the sitting at a table thing goes hand in hand with the weaning thing.

  2. Hey Liz, I’ll email you more info about how we did it, even though I wouldn’t call mine a 100% proven method, since it only worked once, on one particular kid. 🙂

  3. Such great stuff! I love it.

    I betcha she does know what “Yeah” means- she’s a smart kid! It’s just more fun to say “NO!”

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