A baby at heart!

         I can't believe how quickly 18 months is creeping up on us! These milestones in age make us feel so accomplished. Look world! We kept this little creature alive for THIS long. This complex, evolving, walking experiment with no replicates available ( in case this one gets screwed up for some reason). Amazing how pliable and yet sensitive our children are at this age. I feel like the first three years are just going to be a blur they go by so fast. Three years of making sure that little brain of his is in the best environment possible to grow and establish itself so it can tackle the rest of his life.

Some things are most certainly genetic

The changes are more subtle these days. They are mental and emotional changes with a few physical milestones adjusting themselves over time. Although his pronunciation is still quite vague, he tries more words than one can keep track of daily. He enjoys listening to longer books now as he falls asleep at night and lets me know he remembers his favorite parts by mimicking noises I make in the books, through out the day.

I'm pretty sure ALL of his teeth are coming in at once. They have been working their way to the surface for months, but we have some peeking through now. So between teeth and a whole new gambit of emotions, our darling has a tendency to flip his lid. Our house hold runs on a policy of calm, collective and accommodating within reason. For example, right now, the evenings have become a very emotional time again, much like they were when he was a young baby. We do our best to keep things simple in the evening, right now, while he gets through this learning curve. I'm grateful I don't remember learning the sensation of emotions for the first time with no concept of time or vocabulary to express them. How miserable would it be to suddenly feel sad or an extreme desire to do something, being denied the "something" and having no concept of when that feeling might end or how to explain that you feel that way in the first place!! I can most definitely empathize with my son's fits ( even though the flop is pretty darn hilarious ;) ).

puddle!

A recent, fun mental leap for us is Silas choosing to go use the potty of his own volition with out being prompted. We definitely had our fair share of accidents and still do. But if he is not wearing a diaper, he now knows to go sit on the potty to pee and poop. I suppose we are taking the long route on training. It just seems more natural this way. At least for us. He has good days and bad days, which also seems quite natural. So we have days where he is out of diapers all day and days where they are back on.










Swimming has been our mode of exercise and fun this summer. Silas LOVES jumping into the water and kicking his way to the surface. I LOVE watching the shocked faces as we let such a tiny little boy leap in and go under water without a life jacket. Andrew watched videos of babies swimming at specific ages and one observation he gleaned from those videos was that babies up to around 2-2.5yrs of age can not really lift their oversized heads out of the water. But they can swim and they will hold their breath. So that is what we work on with Si. He is doing great and thinks the pool is magical.

We hope you are having a happy summer and hoarding all of the vitamin D you can!!