This beautiful, smart, super-fun girl turned 16 months old Sunday. She gets bigger and seems older every day. It’s an honor to watch her figure the world out.
C at 16 Months
C is so fun and so funny. She has excellent comedic timing, and makes us laugh every day. It’s so cool to watch her learn and grow. She has lots of strong toddler opinions, and she makes them known. But she is still very adaptable and the very sweetest. She’s great at playing by herself. I often don’t know exactly what she’s doing when she’s doing her own thing, but I assume she’s figuring something out. She also loves to engage with us and throw balls, wrestle around, play with race cars and her plethora of stuffed animals, knock over towers, and be chased around the house.
She loves to see what I’m cooking and snack on ingredients, help get laundry out of the dryer and unload the dishwasher, guide the vacuum and mop, and undo any attempt at organization she can reach. While I cook dinner, she is often standing on the counter (closely supervised by Jack) and reorganizing our spice cabinet or medicine cabinet.
We call C our little outside kid because she is always so happy to be outside. We end up outside for at least a little bit every day. Sometimes this looks like hanging out on our deck for a few minutes around dinnertime, and others it looks like going to the park, walking in the woods, or playing outside and helping me with yard work for hours.
I spent the winter going outside with her in all sorts of weather, hoping she’d be weather-indifferent, and it definitely worked. She’s as happy to run around when it’s 45 degrees and rainy as when it’s 70 degrees and sunny. But she (thankfully) doesn’t like to be too hot, so outings tend to be shorter when it gets warmer.
C is a little athlete and she really doesn’t stop moving. She loves experimenting with new ways to walk; the other day she surprised us by walking (assisted) backward up the stairs.
She loves to say hi (and bye) to everyone and everything she sees. One of her favorite activities is pointing to things so we’ll name them and she can say hi to them.
C loves dogs and other animals, dolls, books, pictures, mirrors, music, sunglasses, running water, and anything she can climb.
She loves silly rhyming songs/poems (and she’ll let you know if you’re doing the wrong one), being carried while you run around, and being spun around. We love finding new ways to make her giggle.
C lights up when you clap and tell her she did a good job. She also claps when she thinks she did a good job and to the beat of music. She loves being read to, and especially likes pointing at everything in a book so you’ll tell her what it is.
I think C has all her teeth except her bottom incisors and two-year molars. We had a rough night of sleep a couple nights ago, and I suspect that means means an incisor is on its way. Most of our less-good sleep nights in the last few months can be attributed to a tooth coming through. Fortunately, they usually only mess with a night or two at a time.
Sleep
Bedtime is usually not a big deal. Putting C down usually takes about 20 minutes, including getting her dressed and brushing her teeth. We mostly don’t do stories before bed because she crashes and crashes hard, and then gets impatient about the whole getting-to-bed thing.
Until the last week or so, she let me nurse her most of the way to sleep and then I would give her a bottle to finish the job. The bottle was pretty much always whole milk, since I’m pumping a lot less volume than I used to. Most of my pumped milk goes toward milk pops and small bags in the freezer. Honestly, my supply has been so low, that C would happily takes 8-10oz of whole milk even after nursing and go to sleep.
But in the last week, she started declining to nurse and just pointing at the bottle. So, now she pretty much just downs 8-10oz of whole milk and then I put her in her bed and rub her back for a few minutes before I leave and she goes to sleep.
When she gets up once during the 4:30-6:30am timeframe, I consider it pretty normal. But most days she doesn’t even do that.
I’ve still been pumping for the sake of milk pops for teething and knowing I can nurse her if she needs to be resettled in the middle of the night or early hours of the morning, but until yesterday, it had been a few days since she nursed at all.
C’s bedtime is usually between 8:30 and 9:05. She no longer regularly sleeps till 10am, but often sleeps till 8:30 or 9. And sometimes she’s up before 8.
Her nap is much less tricky than it used to be, which is extremely nice. It’s usually a 2-hours-or-longer affair. No matter when she gets up in the morning, she usually naps around 2, and I can typically count on her sleeping a minimum of 90 minutes. If she wakes before that, she usually nurses back to sleep pretty easily. More often, she’ll sleep for somewhere between two and three hours.
A few weeks ago, she started waking up majorly angry from her nap and I couldn’t figure out why. My mom did some searching and apparently toddler post-nap rage is kind of a thing. Lots of recommendations centered on providing a snack immediately and not trying to engage the kiddo too much till they get some calories. I’ve been making smoothie pouches for her and nudging her to try them through her tears, and it’s gone really, really well. She downs a smoothie, gets some fruit and veggies and protein, and eases into her evening. I get it. I wake up from naps with funky blood sugar, too.
Eating
C eats very well most of the time, and her stretches of eating less usually coincide with illness or teething. She loves pretty much all vegetables and fruits, and eats eggs, cheese, guacamole, and noodles of all sorts very consistently.
Meats are a little more hit-or-miss these days, but usually if she takes one bite, she’ll take several more. She just doesn’t always want to try them. But she does generally like pulled pork.
We eat dinner as a family, and C and I eat breakfasts and lunches together, and she snacks within reason. We usually try to avoid big snacks too close to meals. If she’s hungry, she does well with fruit and veggies as “appetizers.” Some days it seems like she hardly eats anything. Others, I’m shocked that she’s eating so much.
C still loves water but is more curious about other drinks now. She’s tried orange juice and several varieties of milk, but she still favors water. There are worse things.
Schedule
We fit most of our plans into the pre-nap time when we can, since C naps so late these days. I usually let her get up whenever she naturally does, have breakfast, clean a little, and go run errands, go outside, or go on play dates. Sometimes, we have an afternoon play date or swim lessons. In those cases, I try to make sure she wakes up in the morning at a time that will allow a slightly earlier nap.
We eat lunch between noon and 1, and then she plays or helps while I clean up. Her nap generally starts between 1:30 and 2:15 and ends between 3:30 and 4:30. After her nap, especially when it’s nice outside, she’s often ready to go out and play as soon as she’s had a post-nap snack. And then we do dinner between 6:30 and 7, let her get all her energy out by running all over the couch, tumbling around on her Nugget, or climbing up and down the stairs, and get her up to bed once she crashes.
Things I Don’t Want to Forget
- How peaceful she looks when she falls asleep on me and how hard she passes out sometimes. It doesn’t always look comfy, but it’s so sweet. Usually, she doesn’t feed all the way to sleep on me, but if I’m singing to her, it takes about a minute before she goes totally limp.
- She gets frustrated with having a ponytail partway through the day and insists on going through the rest of the day with her hair in her face. Yes, I could cut it. No, I’m not going to.
- When she wants anything, she signs “please” really, really hard and looks up at you with big brown eyes.
- She sticks her tongue out or gets an adorable underbite when she’s focusing. Jack and I both do the tongue thing, but I’m not sure where she gets the underbite.
- When we get out of the car at home, she almost always points at the sidewalk chalk in our garage to let me know she wants to stay outside and play. I get the chalk down, she spends five minutes drawing on the driveway, the cars, and the side of the house, and then she heads straight for the dirt or the woods.
- She still loves to play with my makeup and clothes while I get ready. This mostly amounts to getting all my stuff out and strewing it across the room. But it’s sweet and takes all of five minutes to clean up later. Sometimes, she pretends to put various products on herself. And sometimes there’s still a little makeup on a brush and she ends up with blush on her nose.
- C still loves the tags on her toys and rubbing her fingers on anything that vaguely resembles tags or nubs. She plays with the strings on my hoodies, the extra length on my watch, my hair, the diamond on my engagement ring, and the clip on my bra while she’s winding down. She’ll absentmindedly play with the fringe on a blanket or a tag on her toy while she’s playing.
- She says “mmmm” when she wants a kiss.
- She likes to duck between your legs when you’re standing, and she’ll go back and forth for a while before she gets tired of the game.
- Her squeals and babbles. She has a lot to say.
- When she doesn’t want to be put down, she’ll pull her knees into her chest and refuse to put her feet on the floor.
- She has the best, most genuine giggle ever.
- Whether you’re laying on the floor or sitting on the couch, she treats you like a jungle gym and climbs and rolls all over you.
- When we think she’s tired or it’s time for nap/bed, we’ll ask if she wants milk. Sometimes, she insists she’s not ready for bed and shakes her head aggressively. Other times, she desperately signs “please.”
- We know she’s tired well before she does, so we find ourselves asking this on repeat some nights and she says no over and over. But then something slightly inconveniences her or she takes a big tumble and suddenly she’s at the bottom of the stairs trying to open the gate to go up to bed.
Things We Use and Love
- Pretty much everything from her 2-month post. She doesn’t take pacifiers anymore at all, though she does point at other kids’. She has outgrown the Podster, but it served us well when she was teeny.
- Pretty much everything from her 3-month post.
- Pretty much everything from her 4-month post. We’re done with the weighted sleep sacks, but I’d use them for a future kiddo.
- Pretty much everything from her 5-month post.
- Pretty much everything from her 6-month post.
- The only thing I listed in her 7-month post.
- The only thing I listed in her 9-month post.
- The only thing I listed in her 10-month post.
- The only thing I listed in her 11-month post.
- The things from her 1-year post.
