18-months old

My boy is a year and a half old. It's hard to believe. As he gets older his personality is revealed more and more. Baby Doodle is sweet and kind, he's verbal and smart, he's loving and excitable. He's so adorable it's hard not to hug and kiss him all the time. As far as his advancements go, they're not that different from last month.

He now says his name when specifically prompted -- that's not to say he answers when you say "what is your name, baby Doodle (except we don't call him that)?" You have to point to Dad or Mom first and then to him.

He climbs up and down the stairs without assistance. He comes down forward facing, like an adult, holding onto the spindles with both hands. He climbs up the stairs both by half crawling-half walking and by walking holding onto the banister and/or an adult's hand. It's nice to not be super worried about the stairs any more. We still use the gates to keep him contained, but he's pretty self-sufficient on the stairs.

He goes down the slide unattended. First he went down on his belly facing backwards by himself. Today for the first time he went down the slide sitting up like a big boy. Once he did it for the first time he kept doing it over and over.

He understands almost everything we say to him. He follows directions like, "put the block back in the box," or "can you go get your shoe and bring it to me?"

He tells me when he's pooping and sometimes when he's peeing. A few times he's asked me to "clean" his poop meaning he wants a diaper change, which is a nice switch from screaming when I change his diaper.

His vocabulary is upwards of 75 words. That is a total guess, I stopped counting three months ago when he had 30+.

He's become a bit of a picky eater. Some days he'll eat pasta with tomato sauce and then the next day he'll outright reject it like I'm insane for even offering such crap. He doesn't eat many vegetables any more. He'll appease me and eat a few peas every now and then, but he mostly rejects any vegetable I put in front of him no matter how well it's disguised.

At his pediatrician appointment today he weighed in at 23.6 pounds which is almost exactly three pounds heavier than he was three months ago. He's now in the 10th percentile instead of the 2nd or 4th.

He's a wonderful baby, excuse me, toddler. He makes me smile every day, and that is a great thing. It's hard to believe how much you can love your child.