It’s been a while since I wrote an update on Kay, so I wanted to share some of what my little peanut has been up to in the last few months. She’ll be 15 months old on Monday, and she’s growing like a weed in the sun! Every day it seems like she’s learning new words and skills.

Physical Development

Kay is about 30 wiggly inches tall and around 23 pounds. She now has twelve teeth. Last month we had a terrible time for about two weeks when she was cutting ALL FOUR of her first year molars at the same time. Yeesh! Now that they’ve finally come in though, she’s (mostly) back to her usual happy self.

Kay seems remarkably steady on her feet for not quite 15 months. She can walk backwards no problem, and can she ever move when she has something she knows she’s not supposed to have! Also, she’s a climber (insert sarcastic yay here). She loves climbing into boxes, any kind. I can’t count the number of times I’ve had to rescue her from the bottom of the toy box. Here she is in my basket of diapers. I had them all stuffed and stacked neatly, until she threw them all out of the basket, climbed in, and started piling them back in on top of herself. She sure had fun with them!

This girl loves to dance! Any time she hears music, she shakes her little bum and waves her arms. It’s the cutest thing I’ve ever seen! I wish I could get it on video but the second she sees the video camera she comes running over to see what’s going on. I think I need to get one of those nanny cams.

I’m happy to report that nursing is still going strong, but I am thankfully starting to see less night wakings. Her sleep is very broken up the first couple of hours and she’ll cry until I come in to nurse her back to sleep, but once I come to bed too she generally sleeps for six to seven hours solid.

Language Development

With Tee, I spent so much time keeping up a running commentary, talking to her, naming everything for her, reading to her – you know, being a “good mom”. Now my focus is more on just getting those damn dishes done and forestalling fights between the girls. I just recently realized how many words Kay already understands. Without flash cards I might add. She can point to her hair, nose, ears, head, eyes, mouth, tongue, teeth, tummy, bum, feet, toes, fingers, and hands, and she can follow simple directions like, “Take your shoes to Daddy.” Kay has a few words in her regular rotation now: Mama, Dada, hi, up, ball, this, tickle, and apple.

Social Development

It’s fascinating to me how different Kay is from her older sister. In the last couple of months, I’ve started to see Kay’s unique personality emerge from the amorphous “babyness” that all babies start out with. Most of the time she’s a happy, quirky little thing. She loves roughhousing and trying to keep up with her older sister, which is giving me (more) grey hairs! But take away something she wants and look out! She throws a terrific tantrum, and I’m a little nervous for what the future holds in this area.

Kay loves waving hello and goodbye, and gives decent high fives too. She’s learned that certain animals roar, like lions and bears and the stuffed dragon she got for her birthday. She really likes showing everybody her roar!

One of Kay’s favourite games right now is giving hugs. She runs from back and forth from Mommy to Daddy and flings herself in our arms, giving us big smiley hugs. She also really enjoys dressing up, especially with hats, so I’ll leave you with this adorable picture of Kay in her Viking helmet. (You can see all those teeth here too!)