21 Months

Wow, just 3 months to 2 years old!

I've been saving up some cute stories for this post. In the past month, Valerie has learned some key new words and skills.

1) "No." (Nancy Reagan would be proud.) When she first started saying "no," it was more like a game - apropos of nothing, she'd just sort of sing "no no no no no no no," only it was more like "ñoñoñoñoñoño." Now, however, she uses it appropriately and with full meaning. I actually prefer it to her previous method of communicating the same sentiment, which was to wave her hands back and forth, shake her head vigorously, and scream.

2) "House." Suddenly, everything is a house. Of course there's the doll-house, and all the pictures of houses in her books, but one day she surprised me by pointing to the space underneath the belly of a plastic toy sheep and saying "houe" (she doesn't pronounce the "s"). A few days later at a department store, she pointed to a space between several boxes of shoes and said "houe!" It's like pattern recognition on steroids!

3) Drawing. She's getting better at handling crayons, as evidenced by the marks on the walls of the dining room... and the sketchbook we've been keeping around for doodles.

Then there's just a cute story from church yesterday. I took her forward for children's time, even though she usually can't really follow the story, and prefers climbing around on the pew to sitting on the story blanket with the other kids. She was kind of sleepy, and was just sitting on my lap with her snack cup, when the pastor pulled an apple out of his bag (it was part of the story). She immediately jumped off my lap saying "Ap! Ap! Ap!" and ran around the seated kids to the steps where the pastor was sitting. She stood at his elbow signing "eat" over and over again, but unfortunately he didn't see her. Luckily at the end of the story all the kids got a few homemade apple chips to eat so that made her happy. That's really the first time she's ever gotten "involved" in story time so it felt like a bit of a milestone to me :-)

Right now she has a stuffy nose but other than waking up and crying inconsolably for about 20 minutes around midnight, she slept through the night. So we're gettin' by.