far too temporary

Another installment in the "Temporary Environments" snapshot series, where I'm amused with the overlapping of images on a pane of glass:

Actually, I'm starting to feel that the most temporary thing about this photo is the child herself.
It's astounding how quickly she's growing. Already she's 18.5 months! In fact, other than on a child-chronicling blog, we don't even use months anymore to describe her age-- she's simply "a year and a half." Our brains are having a hard time keeping up with all the changes her brain rapidly embraces. Sean and I frequently watch her, her abilities, her skills, and find her perfectly normal 18 month old behaviors to be utterly preposterous. I'm in a constant state of denial that she could already be so very unbaby, so I'm always flabbergasted when the child I'm mentally trying to constrain to less than 12 months pulls stunts that remind me more of a teenager.

It is REALLY fun, though-- this age. She constantly tests boundaries, but those annoyances are quickly forgotten. There are countless perks: her dance moves, her desire to turn everything into a seat or step stool, the way she blesses you ("esssss") if you sneeze (or cough, or burp, or blow your nose, or clear your throat), her enthusiastic "aMEN" at the end of a prayer, her collections of "interesting" objects, and the way she prances all over the place in the busiest fashion imaginable. Generally she's very agreeable and social, minds well, and is a delight to take places.

We had a check up today with Dr. Boes and got her flu shot. Josephine had a growth spurt! Her height is now 75th percentile at 32.5 inches (two months ago she was between 25th and 50th percentile! She's grown almost two inches in that time!). Her head circumference is still 75th percentile. She's gained about a pound and half, putting her at 25 lbs, 11 oz, (still between 50th-75th percentile, like last time).

She still does blanket time after every meal, which helps facilitate independent, calm play. She's gotten to where she'll do blanket time for a long time, but is pretty intolerant of spending time totally alone in her room now. I try to be consistent about requiring at least a little alone time, but I usually just have to set the bell and limit it to 5 or 10 minutes before she's fed up with it. Blanket time can stretch to 30 or 45 though, so long as an adult is within eyesight and she has engaging toys to focus on.

I hear stories of girls her age who are fully potty trained and have been speaking in eloquent, complete sentences for months. We're nowhere near any of that! She does understand a ton of what we tell her, and she has a good list of words, but she doesn't put them into sentences. She tends to use them for amusement, like when reading a book and naming items or trying to get you to mimic words back to her. When she actually wants something, she usually just communicates through other forms of expression (signing, pointing, making a questioning sound, whiiiiining...).

The vocab list that I've jotted down over the last couple months started with:
hi, Da, Ma (sometimes mama, sometimes baba), hair, eye, egg, ear (sort of), bird, kiss, ball, Pa, bug, dirty, diddle-diddle, quack (ka), oh dear, shoes (a slurred version of the word), banana (she is usually too desperate for one to say the word well), and dog (well, not actually "dog" but a string of sounds indicating dog: "a-woof" followed by panting sounds, scratching at her face/neck, ending with arm patting and "awwwww". Conversations about dogs take forever.)
I added more to the list on 9/1/10: okay (says constantly), turtle (sounds a lot like diddle from "diddle-diddle"), duck (duh), hat, cat (ca), cheese, this, girl, boy, oh no (oh nuh), frog (gggoggg), and clothes (kind of). By this point she was making effort to mimic words back, but it's not like she's regularly talking about clothes and turtles.
By mid-September, we consistently had: amen, a walk, bless you (bessss or esss), these, booboo, flower (owa), Wilbur (bur), snacks (aaaa, while pointing at the cupboard).
That's all from my notes.
Off the top of my head, she also says busy (izz), bath, bottle (refers to water bottle, bottle of milk, and sippy cup), hand, arm, all gone, all done, go, car, moo (for cow), meow, bye-bye, teeth (and she knows toothbrushes make a buzzing sound. well, hers isn't electric, but mine is, and she likes it if you make buzzing noises while brushing her teeth).

She also says "good girl" which is cute-- and I've recently found out that she knows what it means to be a good girl. Case in point: two days ago at lunch she was refusing to eat some vegetables. If Sean is on the phone for work, my consistency with discipline is hindered, because I have to keep her from getting overly loud or crying. Lately, it seems his calls have overlapped several of her meal times, so I've had to tolerate her taking food out of her mouth and refusing to swallow it, but I generally find that rude and unacceptable. She's not allowed to be picky, she has to eat her vegetables. Well, so a couple days ago, he was NOT on the phone when she did this, so I took the opportunity to tell her she had to eat the bite of tomato. She refused. I said it again, she balked again. I promptly removed her from the table and sat her in her crib and left her there to scream for a minute. I went back to get her and asked if she was ready to eat her tomato. When she heard what I wanted her to do, she ramped up the crying again, so I left her alone again for another minute, went back in, and she was ready. As I was putting her in her high chair, she said out of the blue, "good girl" and promptly popped the bite of tomato in her mouth. :-) She's also said the phrase other times after becoming reconciled to the fact that she was going to have to do something she didn't want to do. What's funny to me is that we've never used the phrase as a directive; it's not like we say, "Josephine you need to be a good girl!" when she's acting up. We've always just said it when she actually is being good, or when she does something that's especially well-mannered. So she's made the connection on her own between what "good girl" behavior looks like and the fact that when she's acting up, it's not good.

And now that "good girl" has woken up from her nap (she does usually take two still), so I need to end my rambling...