18 Months Old

Happy 18-month birthday to my Brooklynn!

Her latest antics:

• She has mastered the "kiss pucker" and uses it as often as she can. ;)
• Climbing on anything and everything. If you sit on the floor she sometimes climbs up to your head. She is a complete monkey.
• She says more words all the time, and when it comes out she looks at you like, "what, I say this all the time, you just don't hear me." And then if you repeat it b/c you understood she can't help but change that expression into shear joy.
• Her newest words: eye, nose, ear, mouth, banana, baby...and she continues to say a whole bunch of other words. I can't even keep track anymore.
• Throwing tantrums several times a day. For no particular reason. I think she is just practicing for something to do.
• She takes 3-4 hour naps and has been sleeping like12-13 hours at night. She is such a power-sleeper, I love it. It has been so nice for me with this pregnancy before we start over with up half the night.
• She LOVES people and will go up to everyone and say "hi". But if they try and say "hi" to her first, she gets REALLY shy and won't even crack a smile. It's hilarious.
• Her new favorite movie is "Babe" and makes animal noises the entire time. At the end where the crowd is cheering she goes absolutely crazy. Even jumps up and down clapping. We really need the DVD, I only have it on VHS right now.
• She can do almost every farm animal noise and a few other ones.
• She can find objects if you ask her to....she understands so much more than she can verbalize now. It's amazing. (see video below for an example)
• She likes to wave. She waves all the time, every time we say "hi" and "bye" to anyone or anything (note: ALL airplanes) and we even wave and say bye to the bath water when it's all drained.
• She also likes to high five. She has been doing this for a while, but a simple game of "high five" can keep her entertained for quite some time.
• She has been doing this awesome hulk face that I've yet to get on camera. We call it her "smash face" because whenever we say, "Baby Smash" she makes fists and just bears down, it's so funny. I don't have it on video yet but hopefully soon.
• She also loves to dance. I noticed today that whenever ANY of my Black-Eyed Peas songs came on she would stop what she was doing in order to start dancing. Her dance moves are pretty limited to three moves: the squat/bounce, the spin, and the back and forth sway. It will be fun when she can do a few more but for now she does them all quite well.
• She's been eating pretty well with her fork, but sometimes will just hold her fork and shovel food into her mouth with her hand. I don't blame her, it just works better.
• I'm the most impressed with her tiny alphabet books. The other day they were lying all over the floor and she noticed the letter "Pp" book face down and pointed to it and then made a pig noise. I turned the book over and looked at the front and sure enough there was a pig on the front. She does this every time we show her the letter "p" and can do a few of the other letters, too. (If she knows the animal sound.) I can't believe it. I had no idea kids this young could recognize letters, but she definitely knows that letter is different than the other ones. A-MA-ZING.

She does so many things. She is such a complete joy right now. Definitely we have days where she drives me crazy, but for each one of those we get about 5 days of complete bliss.