20 months

Pancake is lot less difficult now than when she turned 18 months.  She's more reasonable when I tell her she can't do or have something.  I just told her to get off the table and she said, "okay, Mommy," and got down.  Her language continues to be a strength.  Right now she is standing on the stool in front of the kitchen sink saying, "wash my hands, Mommy."  Her cutest new phrase is, "what ah you doing, Mommy?"  And, "what happened, Mommy?"  She says the latter one whenever anyone has a surprised or annoyed reaction to something.  I have to get her on video again soon.  Her intonation is just so cute.  She also likes to demand that I sit, then she sits, then she folds her hands in her lap and diplomatically asks, "how ah you, Mommy?"

She yells at Doodle when he's bothering her, whether he took a toy away from her or is crowding her while she's playing.  She says, No No No No Doodle!  She's definitely not a push over.  And I don't think she'll have the same lack of assertiveness that Doodle has.  

She still enjoys talking on the phone, having both real and pretend conversations.  She says, "hewoh, how ah you?  Good."  She has mastered the shape sorter, and still loves to play it.  She likes to push Doodle's trains around the tracks, especially through the tunnel.  She sometimes calls herself by her name, "Pancake do it self!" and sometimes she uses the pronoun, "I want apple."  She wants to do most thing "by self" now, including going down the stairs, which she does quite well.

We just got back from my mother's house in Vermont.  As soon as we got there Pancake went to our room, opened the curtain to the closet where her crib usually is and said, "Pancake's bed.  Pancake sweeps here."  I couldn't believe she remembered where she slept and where the room was.  The last time we were there she couldn't verbally articulate herself, but the memory was still there.

Just now she was trying to grab a banana out of the basket.  She ended up with two in her hands and said, "two bananas!"  When she wants to pass through a narrow opening she says, "Sowy, sowy, I want to get by."

She makes me laugh, she surprises me with her wit, memory and vocabulary, she's physically cute, but even more her personality and the way she talks are cute.

19 months

Pancake is developing in leaps and bounds and her level of cuteness is rising at the same rate.  Eventually she'll level off and become a bossy two/three-year old with lots of opinions, but for now she's delightful and adorable and we're enjoying every minute.

She's a super quick learner.  A few weeks ago I took out the shape sorter that Doodle used to play with.  I showed her how to do it and she played with it for a while, sometimes getting the shapes wrong, sometimes right.  She didn't know the names of any of them.  Today, I took the sorter back out.  She consistently put the shapes in the right hole on the first try.  She said, "Triangle goes right there," and pointed to the triangle hole then proceeded to put it in.  It's been obvious to us for quite a few months that her language skills are really great, but now she's putting the language together with other skills and she sounds like such a big kid! She just said to me, "That's Doodle's brella, I pick up.  Here you go, Mommy," as she handed Doodle's umbrella to me.

She sings a few songs now: Happy Birthday is her favorite one and she changes who's birthday it is; she doesn't know every letter yet, but ABCs is another one she sings a lot -- she's actually singing it right now sitting on the floor behind me, "ABCDLMNOP"; The Wheels on the Bus (her favorite part is when the babies go waa, waa, waa); Old McDonald; and Take Me Out to the Ballgame.

She asks to go to sleep for naps and at bed time, not every day, but often.  And she means it when she asks, which makes bed time so easy (I'm knocking on wood).  Sometimes when I'm changing her diaper she'll ask for her pacifier (pahfiah) which she only gets when she's going to sleep.  When I say no, she says that she wants to go to sleep, knowing that she has no intention of sleeping.  She's already fibbing to get her way (though I don't let her have her pacifier).

She loves to have books read to her.  She knows a lot of them by name and will ask for specific books.  She loves to talk on the phone to imaginary listeners or real people.  Her memory is remarkable.  When I'm getting her dressed she'll inform me who she got the clothes from, "R's pants, Mom."  She will remark on other things that I had long forgotten about and I'm amazed she remembered or noticed what ever it was.

She's our cutie pie.

Halloween pictures

Though Pancake turned 19 months yesterday, I don't have the time at the moment to post about her developmental milestones and how impossibly cute she is. 

For those of you unfamiliar with Philadelphia/the Phillies, Doodle was the Phillie Phanatic, the Phillies' mascot, for Halloween.  Pancake was a lobster.