Wednesday, May 27, 2015

18 Month Stage

This is my favorite stage!  L is 18 months right now and such a riot to be around. He is fun to interact with and his personality is definitely becoming more apparent.  So far this kid has not thrown any of those "slam the body on the ground, writhe, go limp and scream" tantrums yet... couple of my other kids hit it by this age.  So we'll see... maybe we'll skip it with this one...

L loves to imitate!  He especially loves to copy his 3 year old brother.  It is quite comical actually to hear him sometimes echoing everything that his brother utters.  E is having a blast with this as well and will often come up with pretty silly things to say just so he can hear L say it.

So other than language explosion, this is also a time of tremendous growth in many areas.  Some fun things things we're seeing:

self feeding - usually quite messy but he is so proud of himself when he successfully gets food from spoon to mouth.  We usually help feed him in between his attempts for efficiency sake and to decrease clean up but I suppose we really should just let him do this more...

dancing - we'll often see him wiggling, jiggling... bending and clapping to his sister's piano playing or when we have music in the background...

climbing - climbs on everything!  watch out!

hugging -  love that he can hug me back now and pat the back of my neck with his little hands

imitating - as mentioned before, L loves to imitate.  He not only repeats words and syllables but loves to mirror our actions as well.  Often we see him walking around with a pretend cell phone held up to his ear and he is jabbering away... then   "okay, bye!"

stripping - yup, I've walked in on him with his bottom bare... somehow managed to take off his clothes and diapers...

throwing - well, this started close to when he turned a year and has not really stopped.  What is so amusing about throwing stuff on the floor during meals?  All my kids did this...

jumping - kind of.. they are more like exaggerated knee bends right now... but getting there...

singing - not as clear and verbose as his sisters were at this age... but I can make out the tune and catch a few words... he's trying...

competing for attention - o he is definitely trying to get his voice heard above all the bustle and chatter from his older siblings. Not easy being the youngest of four but this kiddo sure knows how to make his presence known.

Cliche I know... but he is growing way too fast! I can not believe we are out of the baby stage for good.  Well, here we go... gearing up to hit the "terrible twos"!