14 months!

Dear Lucy, 

I'm pretty sure I've thought this most months and actually said it several of them, but this might be my favorite age with you.

You've finally gotten past the everything goes in my mouth stage, (except rocks, rocks still always go in your mouth. Your dad thought we should just let you try them and find out for yourself you didn't like them but it backfired because you do! Yuck!) But this has freed us up to do a whole bunch of fun things together -

Like playdough, we play with playdough at least 30 minutes a day. You ask me to make balls for you and then you smoosh them between your fingers. Or you use cookie cutters or poke the dough with tools. We've done a few other art projects like water painting and crayons and you can use the chalk board but playdough is still your favorite.

You've started looking at books by yourself, mostly in the car when no one is around to read them to you. You look at the pictures and will babble and sign to yourself about what you are seeing.

You had a signing explosion this month. It has been hard for your dad and I to keep up. You can now sign at least 29 words including:

baby (this can mean yourself, another baby or your baby doll)

hot (your own version that I accidentally "taught" you by always waving your food while saying "hot" if you were being impatient and it was too hot for you to eat, but now you know it for hot items and hot weather)

outside

grass

tree

rain

spider (You know this doing the itsy-bitsy spider song with me but I didn't know how well until I signed bug and pointed to a spider in a book and you looked at me and signed "spider" - well then!)

horse

cow

pig

alligator (You know this from a book but yesterday, I said "later gator" to you and you signed gator back to me, cracked me up!)

daddy

ball

water

brush your teeth

potty

sleep

You would probably know more but I have to learn them before I can teach them to you and its getting hard to think up new ones. I tried to find a sign for playdough but haven't yet.

You also do sentences like "kitty eat" and "kitty milk-milk." Now "kitty milk-milk" might sound like an odd sentence but one day you pounced on the kitty and she scratched you. You weren't that hurt, you didn't even cry, but I told you to leave the kitty alone because she was grumpy and wanted to sleep and that when you jump on her it scared and hurts her. After that you kept saying "kitty milk-milk," I guess you know what makes you feel better and you wanted the kitty to have that too.

You also babble with your hands. You'll just be moving them around and sometimes I'll notice real signs in there. At first I worried that you were trying to tell me something but you get frustrated if you do so I've learned that as long as your happy, I just nod along and then after a few minutes, you'll walk away.

You are starting to get pretending and imitation play. You love your baby doll and play with her more and more every week. You love to "talk" on the phone, whether someone is listening or not. In the afternoons, you start asking for Daddy so I wait until I know he is on is way home then tell you to call him and ask him to come how. You walk around holding the phone saying "dadadadada" and then, amazingly enough, in a few minutes he will walk inside!

You also love your small plastic cows and horses. You carry them around and pretend to feed them by holding there faces up to the little plastic hay bale while making smacking noises.

We just started the transition to only one nap a day. So far is hasn't been too bad, you are so active during the day that you wear yourself out pretty well.  I thought I would miss having that free time but we have so much fun to fit into our day, I don't have time to!