Today Celia is officially 1 and 3/4ths! She is one little bundle of energy and intensity for life. She wants to be on the move and doing things all the time.

Her newest tricks are putting words together. She is obscenely proud of herself for combining nouns and adjectives, like ‘cold water’. She’s also extremely fond of saying ‘self’, as in she’s going to do it herself. Colors are a new concept that has also just clicked for her. She seems to understand that some words refer to colors, but hasn’t yet learned which word refers to which color, except for blue. Blue is definitely her favorite color and she always wants the blue plate and cups. She picks up more and more words every day I didn’t even know she could say. Josie loves to help her practice saying new words too, and Celia will cooperate with Josie in those exercises while she won’t with me.

Physically Celia will climb almost everything. She’s running all over the place, ignoring me as I call after her. She doesn’t fall down too often anymore and she’s also learned to jump with two feet and loves to take a few jumps off of our bottom stair step every time we go out.

She’s a very self-directed child. I don’t have to give her a lot of direction or suggestions for what to play with, unless she’s decided to get into trouble. If we’re outside she’s usually good, inside she’s reliably testing her limits all over the place. She is starting to get the hang of not hitting when angry, and even took a few tries at biting when angry, but we seem to be getting a bit better with that, or at least redirecting her to hit the couch. Both girls end up shoving a lot, we’re working on it.

She understands most of what I say, and anticipates it, which means I cannot announce that it’s time for a diaper change unless I want to chase her down. I do much better with a stealth attack. She has also learned a bad habit that we all have which is to say ‘one minute’ when someone asks us to do something. She doesn’t have a sense of the length of one minute yet though nor the implied promise of compliance, so she’ll repeat herself after a minute and be ticked that we aren’t obeying her stall tactic.

She loves to play in the water and the sand and dirt. We’ve been at swim lessons all this week and last and she’s been having a blast entertaining herself for my blissful enjoyment of mostly sitting still while Josie is in swim lessons. Backyard play is also a big hit as is the balance bike. She’s starting to sit down on it and glide a little, she’s going to send it flying by the time she’s 2 I swear. She is extremely determined to figure it out and bike like the big kids.

Unlike three months ago, I can now bring her to the library and have her actually look at some books or toys or puzzles, or at least not just throw huge quantities of books on the floor. She also visits the water fountain a minimum of 3 times each visit.

She loves to play with Josie and have her attention. Together they play a lot of dress up and build towers and knock them down. They struggle like siblings, but they’re starting to learn how to work things out as they both work on their calm and direct communication skills. Thankfully Celia still looses interest in toys relatively quickly and is ready to share.

Celia enjoys helping me mix and cook things, but following directions and impulse control are not her strong point yet so I have to watch her closely. In fact this is definitely stage of life for GOYA parenting (Get Off Your Ass), as I have to physically stop her, catch her or redirect her to get things to change.

• Size/weight: 24 month clothes/ 2T, don’t know about the rest
• Favorite foods: breastmilk, sour cream, avocado, cheese, peas
• Favorite toy: lunchbox and filling and spilling with random things
• Favorite book: Sheep in a Jeep
• Favorite activity: Playing in the sand
• Sleeping: bedtime ~7:45; one nap 45 minutes; gets up between 6 and 7 (on the good days, 5am on the bad)
• New skill: putting two words together, jumping with two feet
• Teeth: at least 16 and more coming
• Vocalizations: two words together, commands

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 18th, 2012 at 10:11 pm by Jen. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.