18 months ago...

18 months ago, I felt and looked, I'm sure, like a beached whale.
18 months ago, I walked hand in hand with my husband to the room where life would change forever.
18 months ago, I met my second favorite best friend (really...just kidding)...the man who gave me my epidural.
18 months ago, my husband and I waited through 20 loooong hours of wave after wave of contraction for one very special moment.
18 months ago, after an hour and half of pushing, that special moment arrived.
18 months ago, our precious baby girl was placed in our arms for a short time before being whisped away, but in our hearts forever.
18 months ago, two became three.





Zoe is a year and a half old today...can you believe it? Not that she was any different yesterday than she was today, but there's just something about saying the words, "my daughter is a year and a half old" that changes the way you think...at least for me there is.

It seems as though this month has been THE month of huge amounts of learning and milestones.



Here's what's new in the life of Zoe:

1. Probably the newest thing is that she has started "talking full sentences". And before you ask, I can't understand a thing. BUT, she's working to communicate. Her vocabulary has increased to about 200-250 words that she says on a regular basis or that she can identify when asked. But lately, she's come up to us with an intent to talk. This is what her "sentence" sounds like. "bayalinercrindinlo", all the while she is locked on our eyes and sometimes pointing at something. This happens quite often. No clue what she's saying, but she's trying to get something across to us. We just wait patiently for her to finish and go, "uh huh".
2. Two and three word sentences. One week she just suddenly started bunching her words together and talking in short sentences. Some examples of her regulars are "get up", "sit down", "jump up", "right back" (for we'll be right back), "wait a minute" (that's not quite clear just yet), "go bye bye".
3. She has learned several more animals and their appropriate noises. She knows about 15 now.
4. She is counting by herself to 4, sometimes 5 and can mimic the rest if we count with her. She tries to show the number on her fingers as she's counting, but the fingers are shooting out in all directions.
5. She loves building with her new foam blocks. She'll build towers and then kick or knock them down.
6. About a week ago, we started noticing that she was beginning to use her imagination. She has a TON of stuffed animals. She will play mommy with them and feed them, put them down for naps, sit them on the window sill, and change them. She'll talk to them as she's changing their position instructing them to "sit down" or "bap" (word for nap). Her "full sentences" come in handy here too. She'll have full one-sided conversations with her toys. She'll even allow them to sit on her horsy and bounce them up and down. She's very precise in the way that she lays them down or the way that she sits them up. Very much like her perfectionist mother. Ah-hem.
7. She has a new favorite word...."opposite". Her great-granny got her a handful of board books at Christmas. One of them is a book of opposites. She will tell me or show me what the opposite is of up and down, fast and slow, and big and small. She's also memorized a book called Baby Faces and will "read" it as I flip the pages. It has six distinct baby faces with their appropriate meanings, like "yucky", "uh oh", etc.
8. She is now sleeping in her toddler bed. She figured out on Friday morning how to climb out of it and how to open her door. We had a "talk" on Friday during nap time when she was told to wait for mommy and daddy before getting out of bed. She's not done it again since, but I'm sure that will change.
9. We're still working on colors. That seems to be somewhat difficult for her to learn for some reason. She still can identify red, blue, and purple, but no others yet.
10. She's learned all her basic shapes. She loves playing with her shape box and her shapes wooden puzzle. When asked what this shape is, she'll tell me the following: circle, square, star, diamond, triangle (pronounced criangle), and oval. She can identify by pointing to a rectangle, trapezoid, semi-circle, hexagon, and pentagon. Yeah, I know, nerdy...but come on...you had to expect we'd go into more detail with math stuff...we both teach it for a living.
11. She knows a ton of body parts now - thanks to another one of great granny's books. Her favorite is the elbow which she'll go point to on strangers, and still the toes...a strange fascination with toes. But her all time favorite is still her belly. She'll walk around, even in public at the store, and all of a sudden rip her shirt up to her face pointing to her tummy and say, "Belly". Oh well, I'll have my time to embarass her at the store in just a few short years...

I guess that's about it. Sorry about the novella you had to read to get to this point.

In the meantime, here are a few pictures from the last few weeks. Some were taken on OBU's campus last week and then the black and white ones from the playground in town.