A whole year and a half. Who knew you could keep on going on so little sleep for a year and a half? I certainly didn’t. Thankfully we’re having a good time and it seems Josie is at least getting enough sleep!

She’s so smart in our obviously unbiased view. She just loves loves loves buckles. She goes to the park and plays with the buckles on the stroller. She likes to play with the buckles on all high chairs too, despite then buckling herself into them and getting stuck. She’s getting better and better at them all the time. Thankfully she can’t reliably unbuckle anything yet!

She’s mastered all the puzzles we have for her now, so we’ll have to find some new more challenging ones. She’s also obsessed with books, especially the newest ones she has gotten they seem to be most interesting. I keep trying to bring out older ones but she keeps picking out the new ones. She’s clearly working hard to learn the stories and words and anticipate what comes next. She also likes to point out the little consistent details, especially cat-related ones.

One thing we commonly hear from other parents that makes us proud is how well she plays with others and shares. That’s not to say she doesn’t have trouble with it at times but she’s always working to learn what it means to ‘take a turn’ every day. She has learned to ask for her turn “Josie turn!” instead of grabbing and shoving most of the time. She offers an apology when she accidentally hurts someone.

She really is a pleasure to be around most of the time especially now that she’s only taking one nap a day (transitions from sleep are rough at times). One thing we’ve found helpful to keep her cheery is to offer as many choices as we can for her to control her day, such as if she wants to brush her teeth first or put on her pajamas first at night. Also outdoor and run-around time (like most toddlers) is mandatory for a happy kid.

Josie’s very coordinated, she can climb the ladders at the park, jump off the ground with both feet at the same time and runs most everywhere without falling down too often. We’re working on a somersault currently, she’s almost got it, gymnastics classes start the week after next!

Hide and seek has become a big game lately. If she’s counting you’ll hear ‘three three three…’ or more like ‘tree tree tree’. Like most other kids her age she’ll hide in the same spot again and again. If I hide myself completely under a blanket she will sometimes be fooled still, I don’t imagine it will last much longer! She also is using her imagination more clearly, we make lots of pretend phone calls to people at work (grandpa, daddy, Christina, Zach). She’ll cook a pretend meal and feed it to her stuffed animals. She actually is getting to be a little helpful in the real kitchen too, washing vegetables for me in the sink. In fact, I can’t go more than two minutes in the kitchen cooking without hearing ‘up, see’ because she wants to see what I’m doing! This is getting long, so you get the point, here’s the short list of details:

• Size/weight: size 24 month/2T clothing, 22.5 lbs and 33″ tall
• Favorite food: breastmilk, cheese, pasta
• Favorite toy: “cat”, “baby”, puzzles, phones
• Favorite books: Time for Bed, Hey Wake Up
• Favorite activity: Going outside and playing with other kids, hide and seek
• Sleeping: bedtime ~8:00; 1pm ~1.25hr naps; gets up ~6am
• New skill: bigger words like “elevator”
• Teeth: 12. 6 on the top and 6 on bottom
• Vocalizations: Constant, lots of commands and always learning new words, starting to make sentences

Our neighborhood lately has become a very exciting place to be if you’re under three feet tall. We have two new townhouses being built diagonally behind us. Plus a few weeks ago our neighbors tree blew down in some high winds onto their house! Thankfully no major damage and no injuries. The kids are simultaneously excited and scared by all the trucks coming in and out of the street and they love to watch the diggers dig. I think the man operating the digger likes his audience as well. Here’s some photos of the tree that went down. Kudos to the Arlington tree department for taking care of the thing in just a few hours.

A few weekends ago Jordi took Josie to the ‘touch a truck’ event in Watertown. The horns and beeping were a little overwhelming but it was a really unique event where Josie got to see inside and event sit inside a large range of trucks from police cars to diggers to mail delivery trucks. Proceeds went to charity. Next year maybe I’ll go too but I enjoyed a little alone time, I think I napped.

Josie has started a new phase in her language, she can now refer to herself. For instance, “Josie sit”. She was already quite proficient at “mommy sit” and “daddy get up” type commands. She parrots almost everything back to us and can say a new word right after we say it.

She also now knows when she’s doing something wrong and if we’re not there to stop her you’ll hear “mommy sit mommy sit” if she were standing on a chair (or whatever the right thing for me to say to her would be) from the other room. It’s helpful for her to mention she’s doing something she shouldn’t! Of course it would be nice if she could eventually listen to herself (or the voice of me in her head) and actually not do it in the first place, but we’re stepping in the right direction.

Today we had fun playing with a friend’s expensive camera. Can’t wait to get our own hopefully this holiday season! Hopefully I can get better at taking some great shots too 🙂

Today I took Josie and Zach to the Franklin Park Zoo. On the way out I noticed that Zach’s shirt was wet. He seems to sometimes take water in his mouth and then decide he didn’t want to swallow it after all, so he spit it out on himself. I go find his extra shirt to give him some dry clothes and put them on him. Josie insists that she needs a new shirt too ‘shirt shirt!’ and I tell her that her shirt is dry, she doesn’t need a new one. I put Zach in the car seat and come back to get Josie. What does she say? ‘Shirt wet shirt wet!’  and indeed her shirt was wet now. She had sucked on her shirt to get it wet so she could get a new shirt too. Little miss smarty pants 😛

Still not quite sure I had the right idea? see exhibit B:

On the good days, I can now get Josie to get to the park quickly by saying ‘let’s run!’ and she’ll run halfway there. Thankfully she’s still nice and slow and gets tired relatively quickly. Still we can now make it to the park (with her on her own two feet) in absolutely record time, rather than the 15 minutes it commonly takes her to walk the two blocks.

Some people like to go to different Thai restaurants and keep trying the pad thai or the crab rangoon at different Chinese restaurants. Josie seems to want to be a bucket swing connoisseur. This week for instance, I took Josie and Janie to the new Cambridge Common playground just outside of Harvard Square. This place is crazy fancy and probably best for bigger kids. It has a merry go round type wheel, except this one is perfectly level to the ground so you don’t run really fast to get it going and then try to kill yourself getting on. It also has benches so that I could take Josie on it comfortably. The playground also has a really funky swing that is like a tire swing except it is a flat platform rather than a tire so you can’t fall through. They also have (non-steep) rock walls, slides, sand, blocks, and water flowing contraptions. What did Josie want to do? She wanted to swing and just take it all in.

[photo credit to my neighbor Chanh]