Lydia turned eighteen months old on the fifth of this month.  Happy one and a half years birthday, Baby Girl!
Unfortunately, my general lack of blogging the past five months has extended to my children’s updates, so my last Lydia post was in January.  Sorry!  I just went back and read what she was doing and well, she’s changed quite dramatically since she was 12 months old.  Here’s what’s going on now…

At Lydia’s eighteen month check-up she got a passing grade on everything but her milk consumption.  She loves yogurt and cheese and (of course) ice cream, but milk is not her food of choice.  Despite that, she has grown and her current stats are: Height – 30.25 inches, Weight – 25.2 lbs, and Head Circumference – 48.5 cm.  That means she is in the 15th percentile for height, 66th for weight and 93rd for head circumference.

Lydia’s motor skills are progressing nicely.  She walks confidently on most terrains, tries to run, turns in circles while playing the ‘spinning game’ with Alethea and climbs on everything.  She also has good fine motor skills and enjoys coloring with crayons, sticking stickers onto paper and picking up little bits of anything off the floor to eat them.

Her vocabulary is also growing by leaps and bounds.  I’m not sure how many words she’s said, I’ve lost track, but it seems like she’s got most of her daily use nouns and verbs down, you know: hug, cup, truck, brush, pants, up, bye-bye, yellow, car, juice, pillow, boat, star, bath, etc.  She says Mommy, Daddy, Grandma, Grandpa, Poppa, and her own name: Dee-dee-ya!  Lately she’s even been putting two words together like today when she pulled The Runaway Bunny and Are You My Bunny? off her bookshelf and said to me, “Buddy book!”  I replied, “Yes, those books are both about bunnies, aren’t they?” And then she held them out to me and said, “Two!”  (I’ve been working on counting skills with Alethea lately and I guess I didn’t realize Lydia was paying that much attention.)

As far as her family relationships go, she continues to love Mommy and Daddy fairly equally and nothing pleases her more than when everyone is all together.  Whenever she gets up from bed, she always asks the getting up parent where the other parents is.  She also adores Alethea, as in, I’m pretty sure she thinks Alethea can walk on water.  Despite this Alethea and Lydia have had a rocky five months or so where they almost never played together and generally couldn’t even be in the same room at the same time without constant discord since Lydia had a tendency to mess up whatever Alethea was trying to play with.  However, that seems to be resolving itself to a great degree lately as Lydia has become more adept at playing pretend.  Alethea has also discovered that Lydia is largely willing to do whatever Alethea tells her to.  Alethea has been known to use that knowledge to her advantage from time to time.

Lydia’s looks haven’t changed a whole lot in looks over the last six months.  She’s gotten a little taller, a little slimmer, and has a bit more hair than she did at 12 months.  Her eyes are still a really interesting gray around the outside, fading to brown at the center.  I’m kind of half waiting for them to go all brown, but now that she’s 18 months, I’ve started to let myself hope that her eyes always will be this beautifully unique color:

Things Lydia likes right now are Baa-Baa (her stuffed lamb), bee-yup (to “wrap up” in a cozy blanket), playing outside, reading books, and trying to get her hands on whatever toys Alethea is playing with.  Her favorite foods are red grapes, yogurt, anything sweet, and whatever is on the floor after a meal (even if it is something she refused to eat while she was at the table).

She dislikes most vegetables, not being allowed to play with Alethea’s toys, going into her crib at night, being told ‘no’ about anything, and most of all, having to go to the nursery at church on Sundays.  She really likes the toys in there, but can’t stand the idea that she isn’t allowed to leave when she’s ready to go find Mommy and Daddy.

We love you, Lydia Grace!  It’s hard to believe that you are already closer to being a two year old than to being just one, but we are trying to soak up every moment with you, our happy, goofy girl!