18 Months

The peanut turned 18 months old a week ago.

Her second summer whizzed by in a blur of babysitters, all with different routines and different ideas of adventure. And she thrived on it.

She is in a developmental explosion. It seems like she learns a new word every day, even if Jared and I are the only ones who understand most of them. She is stretching my conception of the linguistic descriptor called “semantic range”: a “choo-choo” is anything with wheels. “Ewie-uh-oh” is anything she doesn’t like at the moment. “Wawa” is anything liquid, from rain to milk to beer to bathwater (and she wants to drink it all). “Cheese,” on the other hand, is very specific: powdered parmesan, which she eats with a spoon.

Then there are toddler homonyms. You know you’re the mother when you can tell the difference between “ball,” “blocks,” “box,” and the sound a sheep makes, all by inflection, when they all sound like “ba.”

Speaking of “wawa,” this is a water-baby. Every day she asks to go in the pool, and she loves to be wet, as long as she has her cups to play with. She loves baths, listening to the rain, or just dumping water on the floor.

Physically, she is still a pipsqueak, but hanging onto the bottom of the weight charts. But that’s pretty good when you consider that she’s taken off walking like a shot in the last two months.

People kept scaring me about walking, saying “oh, your life will change so much!” Now that she’s finally bipedal, I’m wondering why I didn’t encourage this sooner! Yeah, she’s faster, so I have to be more attentive. But she isn’t, like, less obedient or teachable than she was before she was walking. And the upshot? I don’t have to carry her all the time. My arms and back rejoice!

I am having so much fun watching this little personality emerge. She’s a little spitfire at home, with a wealth of opinions, goofy things to say, and games to play, but she takes a while to warm up to new people. We are learning how to live together in peace – what we can ask of each other, and how to say no to each other, so we can keep doing this happily for a long time. Every time she learns something new, it’s like a magic trick. Watching the brain tick behind those big color-changing eyes is endlessly entertaining. And praying and discerning how to guide this little life into the love of God is a never-ending puzzle her daddy and I get to play.