17 Month Update

Dear Lana,

Today you are 17 months old, and that makes you a very big girl. So big, in fact, that you’ve given up your baby bottles and started drinking your milk out of a martini glass. Alright – I’m exaggerating slightly, but you did wiggle out of my lap on the evening of our first full day sans bottle and proceed to kick back in a chair with your Nuby milk cup and your trusty Elmo pail. The sight of you in that chair swilling milk was pretty amazing because for 16 long months you flat out refused to hold a bottle yourself. Even after you developed the dexterity to feed yourself with utensils, you still sat in my lap with your limbs hanging uselessly at your side whenever a bottle of milk was produced. On the occasions that I was bold enough to suggest that you hold the bottle yourself, you looked at me like I’d just asked you to go out in the woods and forage for food. So, sudden independent milk drinking? That's a big step.

You’ve also begun to try and exert control in other areas of your life, including the foods you eat and the grooming you will tolerate. On the food end of things, you love all things cheesy. Macaroni and cheese, cheese grits, cheese toast, cheese dip, cheese crackers, and most especially Cheetos. You walk around the kitchen chanting, “Cheese, cheese, CHEEEESE!” If that doesn’t work you tug on my leg and offer up a plaintive, “Cheeese, pleeeease?” Then, when it comes time to clean all that cheese off your face and hands, you go… what’s the word I’m looking for? Apeshit. Yes, that's a good description. You wail and squirm and generally act like a wild animal being subjected to a root canal. Ditto for any attempts to style your hair. My aunt somehow managed to get your hair into piggy tails one day, and it was the cutest thing I’ve nearly ever seen. I’ve tried since then to replicate the look, but after a few wildly unsuccessful attempts I’ve decided that my sanity is more important than your hairstyle. How will I enjoy the adorable ponytails if my head explodes in the process?

Another sign of your development in the past month is your growing interest in baby dolls. You have a couple of dolls that you carry around – one that you received over Christmas and one that belonged to me as a child. It amazes me to watch you interact with the “BAY-beees” and copy the things your father and I do with you. You feed them bottles, read them books, lay them down on a pillow to change their diapers, and wrap them up in blankets to rock them to sleep. You even give us a stern look and a shush if we make too much noise when the babies are sleeping. Also, you’re quite the disciplinarian. If the babies ever behave poorly, you’re quick to throw them to the ground and, on at least one occasion, you bit a baby on the head. These are not discipline techniques that we’ve tried with you and I imagine they would be frowned upon by parenting experts. But those are some very well-behaved babies.

Finally, I cannot complete an update of the past month without talking about your vocabulary. You’ve become quite the chatterbox, learning a new word almost every day. You often flip through your books pointing out “trees, balls, kittens, and shoes.” Sometimes you don’t feel like being specific, so you just chant, “I know, I know…” as you turn the pages. You can tell us when you want to “play” and you even correctly identified the first “snow” to fall at our home since your birth. All of your words are music to my ears, even your go-to response of “No, no, no.” I love you more with every passing day, my beautiful, rapidly growing girl.

Love,
Mom

Sometimes You Have to Laugh

Lana is generally a very sweet and happy little girl. Sometimes, however, she likes to remind me that she is also a toddler that wants things done her way. I try to be as accommodating as possible, but there are times when I just can’t do things her way. Like when it’s 20 degrees outside and all she wants to do is stand in the driveway pointing at the snowman, the birds, the planes, and the boys playing football until her nose turns black and falls off.

This is what it looks like when things don’t go her way:


I’m still not exactly sure how to handle these tantrums, other than to run get my camera and document them. In my quest for insight, I turned to an ever reliable source – Vicki Iovine. She was so helpful and funny in The Girlfriends’ Guide to Pregnancy that I was excited to find she also wrote a guide to toddlers. Here’s how she describes them:

“…they are the raw and uncensored examples of our human nature. They are the urges, frustrations, desires and fears that all of us feel, but they have absolutely no veneer of civilization to make them more palatable to their fellow human beings.”

Is that a great description, or what? I haven’t made it very far into the book so I still don’t have a strategy for dealing with tantrums, but I did find something to improve my mood. The author of one of my favorite blogs, The Sneeze, has a hilarious post about a Christmas experiment with his young child and Raisins. Enjoy.