Sixteen Months!

Annika turned 16 months last week, and since this will likely be her last month as an only child, I want to remember what she's like now. I had a four-day weekend for Rosh Hashanah and it was great to be able to spend so much time with her. For most of the weekend I was sick and ended up lying in her room while she played, but I loved watching her and seeing how much she has grown and changed.

She's a big kid -- at her last checkup she was above the 95th percentile for height and weight. She will eat almost anything, although bananas are definitely her favorite food. She is done with bottles. She now can play for hours on end. She's really active and loves moving around, running, and dancing. She's always busy, doing something like stacking and unstacking blocks, moving items from one container to another, etc. She likes to look at books, but usually doesn't want to sit still long enough to hear one read to her. Annika also loves climbing. She will pull off the cushion from a chair in her room and use it as a step to help her reach the chair so she can stand on it.

Annika hasn't added many new words in the past month, but she continues to babble and talk all the time. She clearly has ideas she is trying to express, and I often wish I could understand what she's saying. She has started saying "gracias" and "dame" (give it to me) and is making connections between English and Spanish. At a restaurant she overheard someone ask for water, and she immediately said, "agua!" She'll also say "bye" if you say adios. She asks questions a lot ("What that?" "Where daddy?") and is obsessed with telling the dog "no." Her comprehension has grown so much -- she answers questions about what she wants accurately and can follow simple and indirect commands. A lot of this she has learned from daycare, which she loves. I've been working 10-11 hour days, and although she's always happy to see me when I pick her up, she is still reluctant to leave nearly every day. Her babysitter is a fabulous person; a local newspaper wrote a profile of her here.

My favorite development over the past month has been seeing Annika's imagination develop. She has pretended to talk on the phone for the past few months, but last week she took the phone, babbled into it, and then held it up to Lucky's ear and pretended that Lucky was talking on the phone. She also loves to pretend that her animals are eating or drinking and often burps them when she's done. Here she is giving her monkey agua:

She has a toy car that she can sit on. When I wasn't feeling well, I asked her if she wanted to ride on her car. She said, "no, doggy" and then put her stuffed dog on the car and pulled it around her room saying, "whee, whee!"

I was able to take her to the Brooklyn Children's Museum last weekend and was pleasantly surprised by how much she enjoyed it. She played for three hours and still didn't want to leave -- she actually climbed back up the stairs and ran back inside through the automatic doors when I tried to take her home.

 She was pretty proud of the block towers she built.

She loved playing with the water in a stream exhibit and watching the turtles and fish.

 At first she was scared of the sand and wouldn't touch it, but after awhile she loved it and refused to leave. 

Scott is looking forward to our new arrival, and I'm definitely looking forward to not being pregnant anymore (although trying to lose weight and get back in shape is not that appealing, either). I don't think Annika has much of a sense of what's coming, although she does tap my stomach and say "baby," and will give it a kiss sometimes. It's hard to believe she won't be the baby soon!