sixteen months

dear sweetpea,

your vocabulary has exploded this month! it's so much fun (and a little bit scary) to find out how much you absorb. and you get so tickled by the fact that you can communicate with us. you're a woman on a mission to understand the world, pointing to objects and squealing "zat?! zat?!" ("what's that?"). sometimes you try to repeat their names, but often you just move on to the next item in your line of sight. 

you now say thank you ("day doo"), cuckoo ("tu-tu"), cookie ("goo-kee"), star ("stawww"), milk ("mee"), shoe ("soo"), and sock ("saw"). and you still love to talk on the phone. you mimic our facial expressions and inflections while you talk. and you've started shaking your finger and telling Kaiser "no, no, no!". can't imagine where you've seen that before...

you love finger-painting and playing with water. and you still love to color in your coloring books and your little spiralbound notebook. you bring home lots of art projects from daycare -- sponge painting, using stickers, gluing scraps of paper, even painting with toothbrushes for dental health week! 

your upper molars popped through this month, so you're able to eat almost everything we do. favourite snacks include string cheese, goldfish crackers, and sliced grapes. and you're still my banana queen. the only thing you repeatedly refuse is peanutbutter. i don't know if it's the taste or the texture (or maybe both), but you're just not a fan. 

you brighten our days with your excitement about life's little joys -- like the 99 cent balloons in the Giant Eagle checkout line, and kisses from your puppy, and the robins hopping around the backyard that you can see from your perch on the chair by the piano. you love to help by picking up crumbs off the floor and bringing them to me. and you can follow directions like "go get your book" or "find your seahorse". even though you're walking steadily by yourself now, you still love to push your new (and unused!) potty chair around the perimeter of the family room and down the hall way, shrieking with laughter the whole time. 

oh, baby girl, we love you with everything we have!