Updates

One more thing of note! She is now eating almonds and peanuts without having them broken up for her. We say 'chew' and she bites into them and asks for more. I still watch her closely with them but am amazed she is eating them so well. She also likes Skittles and rarely we give her a few. She tried to say 'skitteh' today when we prompted her - came out really weird but she's trying!

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We've all had the same brand of sick all week, Mark and Esme and I. And because it keeps lingering on in me I've been working the past few days sick myself, which apparently doesn't matter much because now half the store has it. *sigh* now I have two days off again. We won't get to see Grandma or Grandpa until we're all better because they definitely don't need to catch it!


Milk and cereal bar for breakfast, followed by as much
dry cereal or graham cracker as she wants


I need to contact the office where Esme gets her toddler checkups and see if she needs one this month. Some people do 15 month and some wait for 18 months.

Esme is 15 1/2 months now, and she has been doing new things again. For a while now she has been able to 'wrap up' in her own towel after a bath and keep it on her while she walks around. That might sound minor to some of you, but for a mommy that is a big thing so you can get dried off too and dressed without worrying about her getting cold or tripping over the towel (like she used to). She also said 'wrap up?' last night when I told it to her - which was cute!

And yes, she is repeating more things now - which is amazing to hear. She chooses what she wants to repeat and when, but it is much more definite now than her babbling before. 'Movie', 'two', 'green', 'hand', 'bok' (box), 'duckie' etc etc.. are all ones I can remember right now she's said within the last few days. She doesn't actually use the words yet (except duckie) later but she keeps asking about them and repeats them sometimes when I say it. Sometimes we hear her walking around singing 'sound songs' like 'ei i oh! ay ay oh!' to herself. Her favorite word is still kitty.

She can recognize a drawn picture of a kitty, and not just the ones in the books. When I draw a kitty with the crayons she looks at it and says 'mrao?' In the bathtub I had drawn a kitty with her soap crayons and the next day it was still there and she immediately pointed to it and said 'mrao' when we got in for the bath.

She is recognizing 'missing' things - like a page in the book I skipped because the pages were stuck together with cereal bar etc... she wants me to find the page. She also has connected socks with shoes and when I put her socks on because it's cold she wants her shoes on too.

She is waving 'hi' and 'bye' to us and when Mark or I come home from town (or first thing in the morning) there is a 'hi' fest from Esme of 'hi hi hi Dada hi hi hi'. We are still both Da-Da or Da-Dee.

The other night we were going through a seed catalog and Mark pointed out the flowers to Esme and was saying 'pretty' to them. She stopped and looked oddly at him and said 'kitty?' because there was no kitty on that page and she knew there wasn't. Then he repeated 'pretty' and she said 'prittee?' practicing the 'p' noise and she was interested for a while in finding the 'pretties.' However last night she wasn't very interested in trying that again.

I bought her a little toy piano for five dollars and she really loves pushing all the buttons. She pushes a button and then scrunches up her shoulders and looks proudly at it sideways like 'I did that, that was me *giggle*' She has said 'Ididit' to several things she has turned on, closed, etc... which I'm not sure how in the world she picked up because I wasn't trying to teach it to her.

She plays by herself with her big rubber ball now and has great fun throwing and bouncing it around.