Nola @ 18 months

Nola turned 18 months old on July 27th.  Here's what she's up to these days...

• At her well visit on 8/4/11, she weighed 26 lbs, 14.5 oz (79th percentile) and was 31.5” tall (40th percentile). She had head circumference of 48.25 cm. She didn’t need any shots!
• Nola eats all table food now.  She’ll eat almost anything except for most kinds of meat.  She loves sandwich meat and hot dogs, but won’t eat hamburger meat, or the other meat that we eat.  Her favorites are broccoli, applesauce, pancakes, mac & cheese, spaghetti and anything sweet.  She drinks 2% milk, juice and water.  She also loves to take a big drink of whatever we have – coke, tea, etc. 
• She wears size 5 diapers, 18-24 month clothes and size 5 shoes.
• She walks, runs, jumps, crawls and pretty much moves however she wants to.  Gross motor is definitely a strength for her!  She has no fear and will climb on things, go down slides and LOVES to be in the pool or any other kind of water. 
• Nola signs “more” and “please.”  She loves to give kisses and recently learned to give big bear hugs. 

• She still sucks her thumb, especially when she’s tired or upset.  She is attached to her yellow blanket.  We have two – one at home and one at daycare.  On the first day of daycare, the teacher told me that the only problem they had was after nap when she was supposed to put her blanket in her cubby.  Well, that started blankie rehab at our house.  We now let her have it only in her bed.  That was tough at first, but now she’s okay with it.  She’ll still sneak it if she can get by with it, but she doesn’t scream anymore when we leave it there and get her out of her bed.

• Nola now has lots of teeth – including some molars!
• Of course, speech is still our big concern.  Nola is definitely delayed in that area.  I posted previously about how she was going to get therapy, but that ended up not being the case.  After the therapist who evaluated her got all of the results together, she called me and told me that her scores on two of the three tests were in the average range.  The third one was definitely below average, but the therapist didn’t have enough hard evidence to really warrant therapy.  I know that’s hard to understand, but I also know how it works and I didn’t have a problem with it.  I really thought that starting daycare would boost her communication skills and it wouldn’t be that big of a problem.  I started her on Omega-3 and DHA supplements and then she started daycare.  Her language has exploded.  She tries to say everything we say.  She imitates like a parrot, but it’s all unintelligible.  She imitates the intonation of everything and will carry on a conversation complete with facial expressions and hand gestures, but we usually have no idea what she’s saying. She only produces a few sounds (mostly m, b, k, g, n) and a few vowels.  She calls everything “mama”.  She can change the intonation of “mama” a million different ways to mean a million different things.  Occasionally, she’ll imitate something so perfectly that it catches us off-guard.  She has copied Caleb saying “Hey, you guys!” by saying, “Ay, oo gah!”  She also says “ah, mah” for “aw, man!”  She grunts when we ask her what a dog says and she says “kakak” for quack-quack.  Sometimes she’ll say “ow” for meow.  Her other words: bow, go, baa (bath), no, dada, bubbo (bubble), muh (milk), mo (more), ha (hot), ka (car), uh-oh, bahbah (backpack), buh-bub (Caleb), bah (ball), uh (up), eh-oh (hello), ah (hi).  None of these are very consistent.  Some days she’ll do it and some days she won’t. She has quite an opinion about repeating things when we ask her to.  The good news is that she seems to understand everything we say to her.  She can follow directions and point to things when we name them.  She’s learning body parts and her vocabulary is growing.  I’m planning to call this week to get her reevaluated for speech.  We may have to take her to Children’s in LR to get her evaluated, but we’ll do whatever we need to do to get her up to speed.  I’ll update here as we go through the process.