19.5 months

Emma is about 19.5 months. She's been spending lots of time with family for the past 3 weeks. Suds was in town for about a week, then Steve's mom came to town for two weeks, and Kathy visited for a long weekend as well. I know Emma loved every second of it! Can't beat family time! We miss having them here already!

When Steve's mom was in town, we had a couple of outings to Maple View Farms ice cream shop, which is out in the country. It's pretty awesome! The first time we went, I realized that our ice cream was melting way too fast. I could hardly keep up with my ice cream, so luckily Steve helped Emma out with hers. So when we went back, I decided that Emma and I could share a double scoop cone to ensure it wouldn't melt everywhere since Steve wasn't there to help. We had to wait 20-30 minutes to get the ice cream since it was Labor Day weekend. When we sat down, Emma looked around the table and saw three ice creams (one for Kathy, one for Steve's mom, and I was holding the other ice cream). The look on her face was so heartbreaking. You could see her thinking, I just waited in this long line and you didn't get me ice cream. You could see that she was starting to tear up and look really sad. So I had to convince her that I was holding her ice cream and that it was not my ice cream. I let her hold the ice cream cone and I put the 2nd scoop of ice cream in a bowl, so it looked like she had two ice creams :-) She was happy!

We've been good about keeping Emma busy with activities and avoiding the TV. In the last month or so, it's been much easier. She'll actually color with her crayons and not just eat them. At her daycare, they played with Playdoh and the teacher let us know that Emma really liked it. They said she knew exactly what to do it with it, so they were surprised when I told them we had not played with Playdoh at home. When Suds was in town, we decided to make homemade Playdoh and she's really enjoyed playing with it. She'll say "patty cake" while she squishes the playdoh. Cute!

She's been doing a good job with her colors. Initially she called everything blue. Now she's getting better but still has some work to do. If you say the color, she will say it back. She's definitely doing a good job of talking.

She's now calling me "ma-mom" and calls Steve "daddy." We heard her say Kathy's name a couple of times, but she mostly calls her "Kat," which is pretty cute. I think she had a harder time saying Grandma but she'll only get better at it! She calls my mom "Suds," which is a little easier for her to say. If she sees a picture of Suds, she'll go to the window looking for her, then seems to get a little upset. :-(  This has happened a couple of times recently. So I'm torn about showing her photos of family because I don't want to upset her.

She loves playing in the sink with bubbles. It's excessivly cute when she says "bubbles." I think her two favorite words right now are "no" and "daddy." She asks for her daddy all day whenever he's at work. She'll point to his chair at the kitchen table and repeatedly say his name. When she says "no," she likes to say it multiple times while shaking her head back and forth. Her answer to just about anything is "no." I guess it's official that we've hit the terrible twos :-) We get more and more aware of how important routines are with her. If you take her out when she's tired, she will flail herself on the ground screaming if you don't let her do exactly what she wants to do. It's been especially hard lately because she's been requiring twice the amount of sleep in the daytime since she's been sick.

Speaking of being sick, daycare has been a lot worse than mother's day out, in terms of illness. She has been sick pretty consistently since she started daycare, or school, as we call it. The range of severity varies. It's wearing us out. She still has not adjusted to her school. They said today that she's doing a little better. Well drop offs are still horrible. I'm not fully convinced they were being truthful since we've had such a hard time with her around here for the past couple of days. Yesterday she took a 3.5hr nap, then had to take another 1.5hr nap in the evening. She has a double ear infection now and we've had a really hard time giving her antibiotics. Thankfully it's a daily dosing, but she fights it and never gets the full dosage. In the future, I think I'm going to request a shot of antibiotics for her instead of oral antibiotics for ten days. Anyways, we're really going to try to get her schedule more consistent. Only tricky part is that my work schedule is never the same from week to week.

This is the second ear infection that she's had this month. She took Amoxicillin with the first ear infection and developed severe hives all over her body on the 9th day of antibiotics. Although they don't think it's a true allergy, they want her to avoid all Penicillin antibiotics prior to the age of 5. Keeping our fingers crossed that this is not a new pattern, especially considering how awful this last ear infection was :-(

Another joy of daycare is that she's learned the word "mine."  So she'll grab something and say "mine." We've been trying to work on her at home and let her know that she shouldn't say that.

She's very funny about getting things on her hands. She likes to have clean hands. Whether it be food or dirt, she gets upset if her hands get dirty. Ha! If there is not a towel nearby to wipe her hands, she just wipes her hands on me.

She likes imitating behavior. She loves going out to the back deck and sweeping the leaves with a broom. We need to get an Emma sized broom so it's easy for her to manage. She also likes to wipe counters when they're dirty- or at least imitating the behavior.

She's still a little risk taker that likes to get into everything. I think that's just her personality, for better or worse :-) If you tell her no, she'll still do whatever you've asked her not to do, but she'll watch your face while she's grinning. I'm afraid we might be in trouble when she gets older!

She's still the sweetest girl I know! She loves to give hugs and kisses and runs up to us so excited when we get home from work. I just love her so incredibly much!!

Here is the Picasa link with recent photos. I still need to upload photos from the last week or so. Hopefully I'll get around to it in the next week or so.