Yesterday was Alethea’s nineteen month birthday.  Happy Birthday, Baby!

After several months of feeling like things weren’t changing very quickly, I’ve noticed a lot of developments in Alethea over the past few weeks.  The biggest change is in her vocabulary; she’s had an absolute explosion of new words lately.  The cutest one is that if you tell her, ‘I love you!’ she’ll say “I Oooo!”  It’s so sweet!  She also just started saying her name, not entirely clearly, but definitely her name.  I’m so glad, because I was beginning to wonder if she really knew what her name was!

In addition to adding words to her vocabulary, she also added a few tunes to her song repertoire.  Now in addition to being able to sing (tune only) Twinkle Twinkle Little Star in it’s entirety, she’ll also sing (with the words) ‘E, I, E, I, O’ from Old MacDonald, as well as parts of The Elmo Theme song and Jingle Bells.  What is most impressive to me is that she sings the tunes well enough that people (besides me) can recognize them.  I’m so thrilled that she seems to have such an ear for music!

We are making some advances in naming colors, counting and recognizing shapes.  She definitely knows what a star is and can sometimes get circle and triangle right too, she’ll say ‘two, three’ if you start with ‘one’ and she seems to have a better handle on which color is which, although she often answers ‘blue’ without even looking at the object if you ask her ‘what color is this?’

I’ve also noticed that her play time is changing.  She now seems most interested in pretend playing (as opposed to stacking/sorting/manipulating objects).  The other day she was playing with my cell phone and held it up to her bunny’s ear.  I asked her who the bunny was talking to and she said ‘Gramma’.  She also likes to make her stuffed puppy Dee do the things she is doing, like eating crackers or reading books.

Besides playing with toys and looking at books, her favorite activity seems to be ‘helping’ around the house.  She wants to be up on a chair next to me any time I am doing the dishes or preparing food.  Giving her a paper towel and asking her to ‘clean up’ is a great way to get some whine-free prep time when I’m making her lunch.  She’ll happily wipe the floors, cupboard fronts and chairs for minutes on end.  She also continues to enjoy sweeping the floors and has discovered the joy of throwing things in the garbage.  Mostly she even throws away appropriate things, although I have had to rescue Dee or another toy a handful of times.

It’s kind of amazing to me that she’s made so much developmental progress this month considering that she’s been sick with one thing after another all month long.  The antibiotics seem to be doing their job though, because she’s been much happier and runny nose free for most of the past week.  Finally!

I know it’s cheesy to say, but even though it’s been a bit of a rough month on the health front, watching Alethea grow up sure makes it all worth it.

Thanks for reading!