Eighteen Months
Eighteen months feels like a big milestone. Babyhood, which I suppose officially ended at one year, is a distant memory. It's now been gone for half as long as it lasted in the first place, and the six months since Henry's first birthday have completely erased the last vestiges of babyhood (other than his cankles). We even made the switch from one-piece footie pajamas to toddler two-piece numbers, which makes him look like a big boy even when sleeping.
Henry likes to do grownup things with us and is patient and eager enough for it to be fun for us too. Everything takes twice as long, but we can go about most of our usual adult activities with the kidlet in tow. He especially likes to help Daddy with anything involving tools, like putting together Ikea furniture or filling the stroller tires with air. Last weekend he came with us to Costco and the grocery store, helped us clean out the storage room (he even carried one end of a box of clothes with me!), and handed me picture hooks as I hung pictures in the guest room (okay, he also nearly put a hole in the drywall with the hammer, but he was trying to help). We spent so many months dividing and conquering so that one person could do baby things and one person could actually get things done -- I'm not sure if that is a byproduct of only having an hour or two a day with your kid, so by default you do baby things, or if that's simply the nature of parenting a baby. But it's a pleasant change to go about our business all together. It's probably also our job as parents to teach Henry that grownup things need to get done, and to show him how to do them while he still thinks we're cool.
We've also reach the vaunted eighteen-month verbal explosion that I've read about on other mommy blogs. For the last month it's been nonstop chatter with new words popping up every day. He repeats everything we say and incorporates the words into his vocabulary so quickly now. I love it when he incorporates non-babyish words like "nasty" and "alligator" and "upside down." He started using clear three-word phrases a couple of weeks ago, and generally uses them to boss us around ("Daddy shirt off." "Mommy go outside."). He wants to do things on his own and participate in whatever is going on, so "wanna see" and "help please" are go-to phrases, and he talks a lot about his favorite things, especially shoes and trucks (bonus points for trash trucks). We get a good laugh out of his diatribes on trucks because "tr" comes out like "f." It's especially charming when repeated loudly in public. Even better if he looks directly at a stranger and tells them about a dump truck. More than a few of our neighbors went home feeling like dumb f....s this week.
I think he's also beginning to get some sense of time -- like when I tell him "we have to wait," "just a minute," or "daddy will be home after dinner," he will sometimes actually calm down for a brief period, as though he now understands that the world will not, in fact, cease to exist in the next three seconds. He also remembers things from several weeks ago, which sometimes makes it hard to guess what he's talking about, but it's really nice that he remembers people who came to visit. We're still hearing about Dafe from three weeks ago and Amy from last weekend.
At the 18-month checkup, our pediatrician was strongly in favor of trying to potty train him, but strongly against switching him to the big-kid bed. This threw us for a loop since we were planning on switching him to the big bed but not potty training this summer. She thinks he's verbal enough to understand the potty concept and coordinated enough that he can likely hold it. But she thinks that with a new baby coming, it would be better to keep him in the crib for as long as possible so that when the rest of us are up in the middle of the night with a newborn, Henry doesn't feel free to get up and wander the halls with us. I suspect we'll put off both efforts for awhile.
Official stats from the checkup:
Henry likes to do grownup things with us and is patient and eager enough for it to be fun for us too. Everything takes twice as long, but we can go about most of our usual adult activities with the kidlet in tow. He especially likes to help Daddy with anything involving tools, like putting together Ikea furniture or filling the stroller tires with air. Last weekend he came with us to Costco and the grocery store, helped us clean out the storage room (he even carried one end of a box of clothes with me!), and handed me picture hooks as I hung pictures in the guest room (okay, he also nearly put a hole in the drywall with the hammer, but he was trying to help). We spent so many months dividing and conquering so that one person could do baby things and one person could actually get things done -- I'm not sure if that is a byproduct of only having an hour or two a day with your kid, so by default you do baby things, or if that's simply the nature of parenting a baby. But it's a pleasant change to go about our business all together. It's probably also our job as parents to teach Henry that grownup things need to get done, and to show him how to do them while he still thinks we're cool.
We've also reach the vaunted eighteen-month verbal explosion that I've read about on other mommy blogs. For the last month it's been nonstop chatter with new words popping up every day. He repeats everything we say and incorporates the words into his vocabulary so quickly now. I love it when he incorporates non-babyish words like "nasty" and "alligator" and "upside down." He started using clear three-word phrases a couple of weeks ago, and generally uses them to boss us around ("Daddy shirt off." "Mommy go outside."). He wants to do things on his own and participate in whatever is going on, so "wanna see" and "help please" are go-to phrases, and he talks a lot about his favorite things, especially shoes and trucks (bonus points for trash trucks). We get a good laugh out of his diatribes on trucks because "tr" comes out like "f." It's especially charming when repeated loudly in public. Even better if he looks directly at a stranger and tells them about a dump truck. More than a few of our neighbors went home feeling like dumb f....s this week.
I think he's also beginning to get some sense of time -- like when I tell him "we have to wait," "just a minute," or "daddy will be home after dinner," he will sometimes actually calm down for a brief period, as though he now understands that the world will not, in fact, cease to exist in the next three seconds. He also remembers things from several weeks ago, which sometimes makes it hard to guess what he's talking about, but it's really nice that he remembers people who came to visit. We're still hearing about Dafe from three weeks ago and Amy from last weekend.
At the 18-month checkup, our pediatrician was strongly in favor of trying to potty train him, but strongly against switching him to the big-kid bed. This threw us for a loop since we were planning on switching him to the big bed but not potty training this summer. She thinks he's verbal enough to understand the potty concept and coordinated enough that he can likely hold it. But she thinks that with a new baby coming, it would be better to keep him in the crib for as long as possible so that when the rest of us are up in the middle of the night with a newborn, Henry doesn't feel free to get up and wander the halls with us. I suspect we'll put off both efforts for awhile.
Official stats from the checkup:
- Height - 35.5 inches (still following his own curve)
- Weight - 29 lbs (90th percentile)
- HC - 49.5 cm (90th percentile)
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