Seventeen Months

The little girl is seventeen months now. She continues to keep us on our toes and finds trouble wherever she goes. She loves to explore and check out anything new. We definitely keep a close eye on her. One of her upper canines finally came through, so we're all pretty excited about that. I think the other canine is close, but it's hard to get her to stay still with her mouth open long enough for me to look.

Her love of shoes continues and has even progressed to her trying to say the word. It's mostly just "sshh" at this point, but she's working on it. She even tries to put her own shoes and socks on now. She can't do it, but she tries. If she sees a pair of shoes, she immediately tries to put them on - doesn't matter who they belong to.

Stella and Scout continue to be good friends. She loves to play with Scout and sometimes tries to get her tail. She tries to grab it when Scout is busy playing with one of us and it's pretty funny. She's also recently started helping us feed Scout her dinner. It's pretty cute. She comes out to the garage with us and we hand her the cup full of Scout's food. Then she carries it out to Scout's dish (with us helping so she doesn't dump it out along the way) and pours it in (again, with us helping to make sure it all ends up in Scout's dish) and then she carries the empty cup back out to the garage and tosses it in the dog food container. It's fun to see her learning and being able to help with little things like that. She's starting to help us when we pick up her room every night, too. She knows where things go and will put them away if we tell her to.

I have become convinced, this month, that the Lord created toddler mealtimes with my need to develop patience in mind. Stella used to be a great eater. Not so anymore. Even her go to standards that I could always count on her to eat are being tossed by the wayside. Every time I feed her anything these days, I just hold my breath and hope she'll eat it. I have a bit of an obsession with feeding her at least some fruits and/or vegetables with each meal, so it's frustrating to me when she won't eat them. Of course, sometimes that's all she'll eat, so I guess it evens out. I'm slowly learning to be patient, not let food all over the floor upset me, and relinquish control of her eating - at least somewhat. It's hard, though. We're also working on her abilities to feed herself. She's improving with her use of utensils and we've started giving her regular cups here and there with water in it so she can learn to drink out of a cup. It's all very exciting, but will be even more exciting when she's really learned to use a spoon, fork, and cup and can feed herself well.

This month, the little girl has discovered the mail truck. She sees it when we're out walking. She sees it in front of our house. And she loves it! She gets so excited, especially when it's in front of our house and she sees the mail lady putting the mail in the mailboxes. I think, perhaps, that the Easter Bunny will be bringing a little mail truck toy for her this year.

Stella got her first goose egg this month. She tripped at the park and smacked her head on the ground. It didn't last long and didn't seem to slow her down at all.

Overall, she's a very busy, active, and happy little girl. She loves to sit with us and look at pictures of herself or watch videos of herself on our phones. Tonight I was watching some videos of her on my phone with her and I went back to some older videos from last summer. It's amazing how much she's grown and changed since then. I'm excited to see how much she'll change and develop over the coming months.