16 months: Splish, Splash, Soaked!

Today is Rachel's 16 month birthday. I have no stats for her since we don't have a pediatrician here. Maybe I'll get around to finding one for her in the next two months so she can finish her HepA series. We'll see. Maybe I'll try to stick her on the scale at church tomorrow so we can see how much she weighs. Maybe I'll even measure her.

I think she's old enough now, though, that I'm not really concerned what percentile she's in or whether she's growing steadily. I'm pretty sure she's healthy. She's had one cold since we've been out here and other than that she seems to be the picture of health: energetic and happy.

Most of those blasted teeth she's been working on have come through. She's cutting the last 2 (of 7) as we speak and was such a grump today! But soon it will be all over, at least for a little while.

She is talking more. I would say that she's talking more and more everyday, but that's just not true. Some days she talks a lot and other days she hardly says anything at all. Some times she talks in full sentences. This morning she put a book on my lap and said,

"Ma! Me! Me! Read!" which meant, "Mom, read to me!"

Me was said twice because that's the most important part of the sentence, obviously.

She's also combining her signs into sentences and will stick please onto the end of almost anything. Potty, please. More, please. Etc, please.

She's starting to repeat parts of the prayers when we say them. Most often all she'll say is something that sounds like "Thank you" (or "thankful") and "Dada" (when we pray for Daddy to have a good day at school).

She's very obedient and loves to help out around the house. Her favorite chore to help with is laundry. She likes to load and unload the washing machine and hand me the clothes while I put them on the line to dry. She also likes to throw away garbage. Sometimes it's interesting to see what things she thinks are garbage. One day she saw me throw away an empty can while I was cooking dinner and the next thing I knew she had grabbed a can out of the cupboard and put it in the trash. We had to dig it out--it fell right to the bottom because it was so heavy.

And then I had to re-explain the rule of "We don't take things out of the trash" since she saw me pawing through it to rescue the can she had tossed.

She definitely learns by example.

She loves to color still and twirl and jump and climb and throw balls. She loves animals, except not real ones. She only likes pictures of animals. Andrew was reading her a story* the other day and got to the line of a poem that said, "The grison stands erect...What's a grison? Like any kid knows what a grison is!"

Rachel nodded her head and pointed right to the grison.

She won't approach cats or dogs or birds, though, and totally freaks out if they take even one step towards her. Her dog-radar works better than mine even, and she'll be walking along just fine and all of a sudden stop and point. I'll have to look all around until I see a dog like 5 blocks down the street. It's a little ridiculous...and it's not entirely my fault. The animals here are scary.

She learns by experience, also.

Another one of Rachel's favorite things to do is swim. Or bathe. Or shower.

She asks for a bath every time she goes potty. I think that might be part of the reason she insists on taking off at least half her cloths just to sit on the potty--so that she's a step closer to getting in the tub.

Andrew was jealous when I told him what a brave swimmer Rachel is getting to be, so tonight we put her in the tub to rinse her off after dinner and so that she's be ready for church in the morning (because Thursday is a special day, it's the day we get ready for Friday). She had a blast!

I had her lie down to get her hair wet and she was a little nervous at first because she still doesn't like to be flat on her back with water in her ears, but I told her that that's how I would wash my hair when I was little.

I told her that I would shake my head back and forth and my hair would swirl in the water and my mom would rinse my hair out and it felt really nice. I would always imagine I was a mermaid with my hair floating all around me.

So she tried it. And loved it! She stayed on her back for a long time, just kicking her legs and making mermaid hair. It was a lot easier than having her stand up--we didn't get any soap in her eyes.


Daddy stayed and splashed around with Rachel while I finished baking cookies for the linger longer tomorrow. They soaked the whole bathroom but they had a great time! Here's some more pictures of our big 16 month old girl!

Rolling over

I don't know who got the floor all wet. It wasn't me!

Splash, splash, splash!

Splashing with Daddy

I like bath time!

Such a joy!

*The book was Gorilla/Chinchilla and Other Animal Rhymes by Bert Kitchen. Obviously it's a book about animal rhymes. It has very cute illustrations, with two animals that rhyme on each page. The poems leave something to be desired. Grison, in case you were wondering, was rhymed with bison.

As another funny side note about this story, there is a picture of a goose and moose on the title page (not the cover, though). I found it funny that there was no poem about it since goose and moose seem like they'd be easy to rhyme. At any rate, we can never read the story without at least talking about the moose and the goose. Rachel, though, always gets goose mixed up with ghost and points to the ghost she made for Halloween (that is still hanging up in her playroom).