18

Part of me cannot believe that Piper is a year and a half old.  And another part feels like she's been in our family forever.  We have been having so much fun lately; this is a great age!

We went to the doctor today for a checkup.  Piper is now 23 pounds (32nd percentile! We've come a long way since the 2nd percentile!) and 31 inches long (39th percentile).  She is right on target with her physical and cognitive development.

Other notable statistics:

• She's talking!  About two weeks ago, she Josh and I noticed that she was trying to say single words that we were saying--things like "cake" and "church".  Of course, we are now getting her to say all kinds of things.  Brand new words are fish, balloon, gorilla (this one's a little garbled), baby, cup, ball (not bop!), car, thank you, basket, outside, block, box, and shoes.  I'm sure I'm forgetting some because I swear she comes out with new words every day.  I guess that's the way it works!
• She LOVES to read.  Her favorite books are currently not storybooks; they are look and see books.  She especially likes books with animals.  I'm sure you can imagine her making all the noises that go along with each animal!  She also loves books that she can manipulate.  In addition to reading before nap and bedtime, she asks to read immediately when she gets up in the morning and again after nap.  I love this!
• Speaking of nap, she officially dropped her morning nap a couple months ago (but I kept forgetting to mention it here).  This meant quite a change in our daily routine, but I'm now happy to have the extra time in the mornings to play and run errands.
• She began insisting on drinking from our glasses and tried repeatedly to take the lid off her sippy, so we've started letting her practice drinking from an open cup.  We've definitely had our accidents, but she's doing pretty well. 
• She knows all of her basic shapes: circle, square, rectangle, diamond, hexagon, oval, triangle, star, heart, and pentagon.
• We're currently working on learning colors.
• She can identify various balls such as tennis, basketball, beach, soccer, and baseballs.
• She loves playing with the wooden puzzels we have.  They have helped her learn her shapes and animals.
• She gets better using utensils each day. 
• Her little face lights up when I ask her if she wants to color (I don't keep the crayons where she can reach them).  She will scribble away in her notebook for 15 minutes at a time.

I don't have many pictures to go along with this post, but the ones I have won't load correctly.  I'll have to post them separately.
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