15 month update

At 15 months, Harper is officially a toddler.  Sometimes she seems like such a baby to me and sometimes such a little girl.  She is a rather small little girl, according to the chart.  At her 15 month appointment she was 19 pounds, 5 ounces (5%) and 30.25 inches tall (50%) but her head is in the 75% percentile which is probably why nobody really notices how small her weight is.  She is perfect in our eyes and continues to grow so I try not to get caught up in the percentiles.

She is very verbal for her age.  I stopped keeping track of her "words" when they passed 100 and now she is basically a parrot. She is not quite putting two words together but occasionally surprises us.  She likes to point out where everyone sleeps: Oscar bed, Harper bed, mommy bed.  But that is the extent of her two word masterpieces at the moment.  She seems to have developed a sense for who I talk on the phone to frequently and now when I pick up the phone she says, "Amy!".  We tell her about her cousins, uncles, aunts and grandparents and hope that the frequency with which we talk about them and show her their pictures will help bridge the mileage gap between us.  It's funny, she likes to say her cousins names- Noah, Lucy, Leo- but will not say Luca.  I assume it is just a difficult name for her to say.  When I ask her about Luca, she immediately replies, "No-no" (her name for Noah). 

A happy birthday wish from our burly nephew Leo!

I snuck one in! (a bow, that is....)

It stayed in for at least 20 minutes!

In the "bungee room" at the Denver Art Museum

Harper story

Harper's hair, as you may or may not have noticed, is rather unruly.  It's getting long, it's baby-fine, it's curly in some spots and straight in others (unless we're on the east coast and then it's all curls thanks to the humidity- gosh, another reason to move back!!) and if I don't do anything to it she kind of looks like a mad scientist.  I genuinely try to fix it whenever I can, we have a collection of bows and headbands that rival any of the other girls in our playgroup.  However, while many of Harper's friends are content to become engrossed in an episode of "Dora the Explorer" while mommy fixes their hair, that is not my child. Sitting still and succumbing to distractions are not part of her make up.

This morning we had our typical game- me trying to sneak a bow in her hair, her pulling it out in half a second and trying to put it in my hair, repeat, repeat.  A new addition to our game is a word that she clearly understands now: No.  She chants "no" the entire time during our game. So I broke everything I thought I would believe in about how to speak to a female child and tried to explain to her that she would look "pretty" and "don't you want to look pretty, Harper?"  No, Harper didn't want to look pretty so I took my mad scientist out in public and got over it.  Later we had a visitor at our house: yet another person to give us an estimate on blinds, which are still missing from our house and the reason why Harper has bath towels hung over her window to block out the light.  Harper and I answered the door and the woman immediately exclaimed to Harper, "what a pretty girl you are!" and Harper immediately reached for her hair to feel for a bow and started her "no:" chant. At the moment in Harper's world, pretty= bow in her hair and she wants nothing to do with it.

Bath time

At the beginning of her bath, Harper put her washcloth on her head and told me, "hat."  She left it on until I washed her hair.

Actually Harper, that's Oscar's bed

and how did Daddy's shoe get in there?

Getting all of her ducks in a row....

Morning at the Children's Museum

We decided to hit the Children's Museum as soon as it opened to check out all the spots we usually avoid because they are overcrowded with big kids. (Normally we stay in the under 4 area)  Harper lounges against the tree roots, exhausted from crawling and climbing through all of the tunnels below.  There are stuffed ants and squirrels all around and even ant costumes that the kids can put on to crawl through the tunnels.  She loved it!!

A very sleepy girl shows off

her new car seat and new favorite food....clementines!  Actually, Harper just calls them oranges.  As far as favorite foods go, first it was pancakes, then bananas, now clementines.  At least it's not french fries, potato chips and ketchup.  We were on our way up to Boulder to pick up a composter for our yard- to put all of those clementine peels in.

Zoe & Harper reading some books...

without pants, don't ask...

Fortunately, putting them back was just as much fun as taking them out.

Playing peek-a-boo with a coaster

Sleepy girl after a morning at the zoo

Exploring outside on a 60 degree winter day

posing for the camera

We have internet....finally!

So sorry I have been posting so infrequently these days.  I'm not trying to prevent you from seeing pictures of our precious daughter, it's just that we have had no internet access.  Our new home did not have a single working phone jack in it- just something that was overlooked in the remodel, I suppose?  Anyway, we are back online and I will be back to posting very soon...hopefully tomorrow!