Today we went to the doctor’s office for Alethea’s 18 month check up.  Turns out she didn’t go through a growth spurt last month.  Her current stats are: height – 31 inches, weight – 24lbs 2oz, and head circumference – 47.5 cm.  Only growing .25 inches in the last three months means she’s now down to the 29th percentile for height.  However, she did gain over two pounds so she’s up to the 47th percentile for weight.  Head circumference is still her highest percentile at 76th.

I’m not worried about the height thing though.  I never expected to have a tall child and Alethea always seems to need to put on a few extra pounds before she’ll shoot up, so I imagine she’ll be doing that here shortly (no pun intended).

While Alethea didn’t grow in height as much as I had anticipated, she did something today that made me realize she is retaining things longer than I had thought.  At our ECFE class the parents say this chant with the kids:

“Tick tock, tick tock, I’m a little cuckoo clock, now it’s striking one o’clock” (while we chant the kids rock side to side on their feet)

Then we lift the kids in the air and say “Cuckoo!”

I knew Alethea liked this game and we did play it at class last Thursday, but I was still surprised today when I saw her playing with Dee (her stuffed puppy) and all of the sudden she lifted him above her head and said “Cuckoo! Cuckoo!”  That means she remembered the game for four days, without any reminders from me!

It’s great that she’s growing up, but a little scary too because I feel more than ever the weight of knowing that she’s retaining (and internalizing) both the bad and the good for so much longer than she seemed to previously.  Yikes!