January 28, 2020

18 months of Wells.

This post is way after his actual 18 month mark, but his 18 month appointment wasn't until this week. I wanted to get a weight/height in here.


Unfortunately, we don't have a height because they couldn't get one. 
He wouldn't stop flailing. He weighed 24 pounds though. 



Sleep.

I went on and on about sleep on Instagram last month. Wells did great with sleep for a few months there, and then fell apart as we traveled for Christmas. Luckily this short-lived. As for an 18 month sleep regression...eh? His only change is that he gets up earlier than I would prefer. He goes to bed at 7pm, as usual, and will get up around 6am, which I do not like. I'm trying to push him closer to 7am, but it's easier said than done. I think he's waking up hungry.

He's still napping consistently, though his naps have been really early (10am-12pm) the last two weeks. He's still perfectly happy all afternoon and evening. So as long as he IS napping, I don't really care when he does it. I just want him to start sleeping later in the morning. Ten+ hours straight at night isn't anything I'm going to complain about, though. I, personally, just need to go to bed earlier if I'm tired, instead of forcing myself to stay up and do things. (This is totally a me problem, not a Wells problem.)

I'm waiting a few more months, and then I'm going to start using the "okay to wake" function on the Hatch Rest. But since he's had that Rest since before he was born, it's like wallpaper to him. I was wondering if getting an actual "okay to wake" clock might be worth it, because it'll be new and novel.

He has a pillow now and loves sleeping with his (my) moose.

Scott bought me this moose a week after we moved to Alaska.


Food.



I love coming up with new things for Wells to eat and I really enjoy putting his meals together. His favorite food is probably Club Multigrain Crackers and he particularly likes it when I dip them in guacamole.
And some days, he really just drinks so much milk that it fills him up.
He loves chips. Like, to the point where I don't buy them because if he sees me eating them, he'll eat them too, until I put them away.
He will eat cakes, cookies, ice cream, but we don't give him those things very often. He's never had juice or chocolate milk* and I don't plan on starting that any time soon. I'm not averse to giving him something sweet, but there's really no point in starting that; he'll discover it all on his own eventually.

*I've met a mom or two who've said their 18 month old will only drink chocolate milk and not regular milk. Okay, Jan. If Wells would only drink chocolate milk, Wells would be only drinking water.

He loves grapes, and will gnaw on half an apple for awhile. It's a good source of amusement for him. He loves baked potatoes too, and I don't even put anything on them. He just eats them plain.  Anything with corn and black beans and Mexican seasoning is also always a winner.
I try to mix vegetables in some form into all of his food but, aside from that watermelon phase over the summer, he's really not into fruit. Cheese and yogurt also seem to be on his no-go list.
Wells loves him a smoothie though, and on the days when all he seems to consume are dry Cheerios, crackers, and milk, if he and I can split a spinach and kale smoothie, it's been a Good Day.
I use my regular smoothie recipe: half a banana, a few frozen chunks of pineapple and mango, greens, and unsweetened almond milk. He loves it.

Another trend I've heard parents talk about: toddlers will not sit to eat. I've been quite consistent to this point. But he eats so often and in small doses so I try not to get too shrill about it. Messy stuff is always eaten in the highchair, but he loves to eat Cheerios in his Anywhere Chair in front of the TV. Eh.

He's getting much better at going out to eat. I take food for him and give him a bit of whatever I have. He has taken quite a liking to crab rangoon.

He doesn't eat a ton of meat; usually he just spits it out. I always had texture issues with meat as a kid, so I don't really care.




Words.

Dada, mama, Jett, more, and car. Me-me-me is what he says while I'm pouring his milk or getting him a snack. He also has a lot of random words that mean something to him, but I haven't been able to nail down a definition: dooka-dooka, gee, and whoa-whoa (which I think is uh-oh). I say please and thank you for him but he can't repeat it yet. He understands us just fine. If I say "Little Baby Bum", he runs to sit in his chair in front of the TV,  if I say "bath", he runs to stand by the tub, and if I say "find a book", it means it's time for bed and he gathers up his lovies and runs to his room to pick a book on the shelf. He just recently started saying bye-bye and waving. He'll say bye-bye dada, which is very cute. He'll say hot when he touches warm water or eats warm food.

He's been saying hop and trying to hop. He says quack and clap pretty often. He will applaud himself and cheer if he knows he did something correctly.
He likes animal sounds and vehicles of all kinds. His favorites are fire trucks and ambulances. He doesn't call them cars but I'm sure he's said fire truck a few times. He just does not speak on command so it's hard to get a metric on his words sometimes.

He loves giraffes. He finds them anywhere they happen to be. He does say "gee" at this point, so we think maybe he's trying to get out "giraffe". The same with planes. He doesn't have a word for those, though.




Some randoms:

He cannot climb. It's almost comical and I'm. so. grateful. He can get from his Anywhere Chair up onto the couch, but only if I push the chair up next to the couch for him. He just, in the last month or so, started pushing himself down off of the couch. Now, at other peoples' houses, if the couch is lower, he can go up. He cannot do it here though and I think that's great.

He has little to no patience for the stroller. So we only use it to take walks with the dogs because I can't maneuver three small living things at once. (This is when I truly miss the tiny baby in the Ergo. Life was easy in that regard when he was less than 5 months.)
He walks or we carry him. He's learning how to hold hands but I think he's still a little short for that so it's not natural to him at all. We practice, though.

He does not care what we think. He's ridiculously independent unless, of course, he's at the gym childcare. So, there's that.

We went to the Children's Museum last week again and he just ran off.

I couldn't even get a picture of him with Daniel's trolley because he wouldn't stop long enough to look up. (This is why we don't even bother with a stroller in this type of situation now.)






Also, he's been really into this lately:


I can only hope he has a proclivity toward all things neat and orderly in the future. Fingers crossed.

2 comments:

  1. I love hearing all this - growing up so fast.
    Its great he loves smoothies - sneak in all the good fruits/veggies in it
    Baby language & those first words - that's just the cutest little language there is. - love jett is one of his words.
    I'm with Wells - I love giraffes - I think they are just so beautiful.

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  2. Is lining up cars the most quintessential toddler boy way of playing, ever? It cracks me up. Cyrus will take all the little random cars that my parents have at their house and make one long neat line along the edge of their wooden entertainment center. Keeps him busy!
    First words are so fun...even when they don't really sound like real words at all. Cyrus has been really making a lot more connections with words lately, and I realized he's actually started to respond to Spanish commands...which for a long time he was only responding to English commands because Angel isn't around him as much. I think Christmas break really helped with that.
    Cyrus's favorite drink is "tea"...which, when he asks for "tea", I normally give him ice water. I'm pretty sure by "tea" he means any drink with ice in it. Angel usually drinks what I call iced "cinnamon water" (boiled water with cinnamon sticks)...and that is Cyrus's favorite "tea." I actually kind of forgot about chocolate milk...I don't think it's sold here. I'm sure I could find Hershey's syrup to make some...haha I actually loved chocolate milk as a kid but never thought of giving it to Cyrus. Living in a country that doesn't even have most of my "guilty pleasure" snacks probably makes it easy to feed him healthier since I don't even like the local candies or snacks so I don't buy them for myself and have to share. :P

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