18 months of Moosh – yay!

Ashley is 18 months old today!! I don’t know that is possible, but it is. So crazy. I was going to do a big braggy entry about all the awesome stuff she can do, but she is being a fussy sleeper and won’t let me leave her side tonight so I am stuck on my phone. So this may be quite short.

She knows all the letters of the alphabet (that is a weird way to word it, I think, but to me, saying she ‘knows the alphabet’ implies she knows the order.) and adores the alphabet song. She often asks "a b c me?" which means "will you sing the alphabet song to me?" Only once have I gotten her to sleep without the use of boob, and I did it by singing the alphabet for 10 minutes.

She knows the number 0 to 9. She is slowly learning that 1 and 0 together means 10. She can’t count past 3, but she recognises the shapes of the numbers. She knows 7 comes after 6 and 8 comes after 7.

She knows lots of animals, foods and other objects. She has only seen drawings of zebras/giraffes/elephants but this morning we saw them on tv and she knew what they were. She also somehow knew that butternut squash is pumpkin, even though she has only seen drawings of ‘standard’ pumpkins and that is it.

More than a month ago, I stopped counting how many words she knows, because she got to 100. She easily has, on average, 1 new word a day. So that puts her at about 140 words. She doesn’t often talk around people other than us two, so I don’t really know what is word-words and what is mummy-understands-your-sounds words.

She is really craving control lately. Diaper changes, outfits, meals… only ok if she chooses when and where and how. I try to make everything possible seem like a choice she is making, which makes us both happy.

I’m trying really hard to break her annoying habit of grunting "uh!" when she wants something. I know she has the vocabulary to tell me what she is after, so it bugs me when she tries this.

She cannot pronounce the f-sound very well. Fish is sh-ish, flower is shower. Our friend Felicita, Foo-Foo, is Soo-Soo.

She will, finally, sit on the couch and watch tv without me sitting next to/under her. We started a week or so ago with her watching Elmo’s World while I sat at the dining table and ate my breakfast. Today she sat amd watched Elmo while I was in THE OTHER ROOM doing dishes. She rarely lets me leave her when there are other people with her, huge big amazing deal that she stayed in there alone for 15 minutes. As soon as the show ended she came in and told me all about it ("Elmo. Dancing. Sh-ish. Dorothy. Elmo.")

She is still in our bed all night every night, but she is showing more interest in her crib and I still hold out hope that she will sleep in there again. Maybe once she is no longer breastfeeding, at least at night.

She said "beh-soo" after I sneezed the other day. Twice! She looked so excited that I sneezed and she got to say that.

Im sure there is more I could say, but I can’t think while surrounded by snoring and kicking.