Our Esme at 20 months

There have been a lot of changes around here!
Esme is trying to jump, but she doesn't actually leave the ground. She can go frontways down the stairs inside and outside the house, but we still get worried and stay 'downhill' of her, accompanying her each time.

Her talking is improving a lot, but I can't say she has learned a whole lot of new words in the past few months. She still 'mimes' and signs lots of things, adding in a few of her words here and there. She talks all of the time, but so much of it is babble we are left asking 'what?' There are probably more words there we just aren't hearing clearly yet. She surprised us the other day by telling Daddy he did a 'good job' I had asked him to show her the one leg, two leg part of putting on pants and she commended him for a great performance. We all laughed.

She is always copying us, and guessing ahead in things we are doing trying to help. Is starting to understand complex 'abstract' ideas as well as just directions. IE: I told her not to hit the oven door with her wooden door handle because it could break (no response), then I added that if it broke we couldn't make chicken anymore EVER, remember chicken goes there, cook cook, nom nom(eat)? Break door means no more chicken, unless we buy a new oven, and they are expensive so we wouldn't have chicken for a long time. She put her hands over her mouth and stared at the handle, the door, where we keep the chicken etc etc and started her 'scared' crying. I told her it was okay because the door was not broken so we could make chicken 'later' - but DON'T hit the door with ANYTHING. She put the handle away in a drawer with her 'pat' sign that means 'this stays here.'

She is 'replaying' things she has done recently - like pretending to put on shoes, pretending to eat/drink, take a bath, do her hair, etc etc... I see her mime these 'things that happened' to herself, to the dog and also to Daddy. My favorite was when she was running across the floor into some dirt I had swept up and skidded on the pile. Then I threw the dirt away and she couldn't make it happen again. She spent about five minutes trying to 'replay' what she had done that made that happen - and looking at her shoes, the floor etc etc... Mark saw it too and I told him what she had done before, and he laughed at her 'scientific method' of recreating the scene.

Still pointing out letters on everything, but getting more of them right. She likes her fridge magnets and plays with them often in the kitchen, picking up magnets and asking me/telling me what they are. Loves Starfall.com and wants to operate the keyboard by herself, pressing the right keys and choosing which letters she wants to see next. She jabbers on her dead cell phone and pretends to be calling Grandma/Grandpa, a 'kitty', etc etc... She carries on long conversations with Iggy, her puppy, which involves a lot of hugging Iggy, stroking her ears and sometimes identifying her nose/ears/eyes.

Very clingy when I am going to work - starts a tantrum if she THINKS she saw some sign that I am going to work soon. She is all about process and order, telling us the next step in things etc. She connects actions done together and will 'surmise' that something else (like going to work) will happen and get very upset about it before it happens. On the other hand, I can tell her we are going to 'X', 'Y' and then 'Z' and she is understanding that remarkably well. And if I do something else as well in between there though, she may get mad at me because I didn't do it like I said I would.

We are starting to read Mommy's 'time' too, (what I call my watch, so she doesn't get confused). She reads the numbers oddly though - 1 is 'E' or 'I', zero is the letter O and she gets confused on most of the others except 2 and 3. It is funny she will point to my watch and say 'E O ? ?' for 10 am. I tell her we'll do something 'later' often and she is trying to figure out exactly what that means. That is why I started the watch thing - to indicate what 'later' was and also because I found it fun to connect numbers that way for her.