15 month update

First pigtails

Little Ms. Magpie is 15 months old! (ok...coming up 16 now. As usual I am late.) 

Food

Magpie seems to be enjoying her food (also enjoys hurling it off of the high chair, unfortunately. Hopefully we can make some more progress on that soon). She is doing better with signing "more" or "all done" and we try to respond (reinforce) right away with either one right now.

Some of her favorite foods right now:

blueberries

kiwis

bananas

raspberries

blackberries

string cheese (mozzarella in particular)

cooked spinach

cooked kale and kale chips

broccoli

beans (pinto, black beans, kidney beans, garbanzo beans you name it!)

sweet potatoes

peanut butter

cashew butter

chicken soup

brown rice

lentils

roasted seaweed (don't ask me - Will gave it to her and she loves it)

Dr. Praeger's Fishies

hot dogs, beef, chicken, pork, eggs (girl likes her protein)

I have to say, I am thrilled that Magpie is eating more. I am even more thrilled that she eats a wide variety of fruits and vegetables. Especially thrilled that she likes her leafy greens, since they are such nutrition powerhouses. I'd had some worries about how you get kids to eat healthy stuff? Worrying that I need to feed her stuff I don't think is very nutritious (like mac and cheese) just to get her to eat more. Because then she'll develop a taste for it, and then maybe not like healthy food, and then, oh no! A fair amount of back-of-the-mind obsessing. So far, though, this just hasn't been an issue. She models what she eats after us. And when she gets bored, it will re-perk her interest if I spear whatever food item I'm hoping she'll eat more of with her small fork so she can feed herself with the utensil. We usually get an extra 8-10 bites in that way. So yay! My little scrawny girl is filling out and is getting lots of nutrition. Geez, way more than I ever got, and look how I turned out! Hmm...cancer, infertility...well...I guess good thing she's eating better than I ever did, actually.

Magpie is drinking water out of a cup with a straw and uses a spoon reasonably well and sometimes a fork. She'll concentrate really hard on trying to stab things with the fork. She's not so efficient at it, but persistent! She looovves to feed herself, but sometimes will let you spoon something in if you hold her on your lap (and she really wants it). And she will definitely let you stab with the fork and then hand it to her loaded up with food.

She still drinks one 6 ounce bottle of frozen breast milk a day, and the other bottles are sometimes cow's milk, sometimes formula (We've been using Baby's Only with DHA). I've kept the formula around longer than I might have because I think it is a bit fuller nutritionally than cow's milk, but our most recent order of six cans of powder will be our last, I think. 

Bottles and Pacifiers

I still give Magpie a bottle four times a day. I also think I will soon cut the bottle back to morning and night, just to give her more practice and familiarity with the sippy cup. Also, Magpie still uses a pacifier at naptime and bedtime. She has a lovey, a little Gund lamb she loves (I actually have two of them, in case of some type of laundry disaster or lost lamb issue). Magpie is probably going to be my only child (you never know, but this is my expectation), and these things bring her comfort and joy, so I'm not in an especially big hurry to take any of them away from her. But I also don't want to limit her or keep unnecessary things around so long that they become harder for her to give up later. So Will and I are in discussions about transitioning out the pacifier (I'll be honest - proposed by Will). But we both agree, definitely not until we get back from our Middle East trip this Spring.  

Language

Magpie seems to be understanding more and more in English and Spanish. She says about a thousand things that sound like gibberish, plus a few words: 

-hi (with wave)

-bye bye (with wave)

-dada (he's like a celebrity to her around our house these days, hands down her favorite person, always said with the sign)

-mama

-blueberry (I know, crazy long word, right?)

-bottle

-Lambie 

-dog

-moo

-meow

-Moxie

-stay (with hand command, to Moxie and hilariously to her friends as well - bossy girl in the making?)

-sit (to Moxie)

-uh-oh

More and more she'll repeat a word that you've just said, which is cool. But I don't count those as words in her vocabulary until she says them on her own.

Singing and Counting

Magpie likes to "count" along with you - objects in a book or bath toys, or toes, or whatever. So she will point and say "da, da, da, da" as she goes along. So first steps toward counting! She also "sings," it used to be this dreadful moaning sound that she would make while you were singing, but now especially with the ABC song, she'll "sing" along, with an almost right melody and the right phrasings of single syllable sounds, if not the right ones yet. She also likes "Old MacDonald" and will just burst out with the refrain "Ee-I-ee-I-O!" She doesn't have it quite right but it's recognizable. 

Books

Magpie is still loving reading. Which makes me a happy mama, and she is becoming more tolerant of books with a storyline. I will do a post on books soon, but some of her current favorites are "Mommies say shhh," "Llama Llama nighty night," "Time for Bed," "Click, Clack, Moo" and some Spanish books that have pics of babies.

Motor
Gross motorwise, she is becoming a climber daredevil girl. Climbing on the couch, climbing on the handle for the drawer to the broiler in our stove (Noooo!), climbing on and standing on top off her newish ride-on toy (OMG) and pushing around a little cart she has with various items she likes to put inside. It's a matter of time until we have a major accident with the climbing situation.
Fine motorwise, she stacks blocks and is trying to use utensils, she'll try to hold a pen or marker and "write" with it.

Grooming/Dressing

Magpie also loves brushing her tongue when we do tooth brushing (go figure) and has three molars. Wow, how did that happen? And she loves to take our clothes if we leave them on the floor and put them around her neck, like she's putting them on. She will try to put on her socks herself (not successfully of course). She will also put on a winter cap of ours if it's left around and walk around with her eyes covered.

Sleep
We are lucky on the sleep front (although I am STILL somehow so overtired!). Magpie is sleeping usually 8pm-7am or so. We have reduced naps to one longer nap a day, usually taken in the afternoon 1pm-3pm-ish, sometimes more.

Sizes
She still wears size 2 diapers, although Will just bought her size 3's for overnight (they're still a bit big though). Someday my little munchkin will really graduate to the next size up. She is wearing size 6-12 pants but is long in the torso and arms for six month clothes, so for shirts and things wears 12 month size. I love love love consignment shopping for her. Can score some really adorable things that I would never pay full price for. I've just learned I have to check the care instructions. I made the mistake a couple of times of getting dry clean only clothes (why would you even make that for a baby?)

Checkup
Her 15-month check up went well. We added the typhoid fever vaccine to her others, since we will soon travel to the Middle East.  Magpie is now in the 11th%ile for weight (yay, Magpie!), and around 50th%ile for head circ. and length.

How's that for a "brief" update?! Can you tell, I love, love, love this girl?

Mo

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