17 months old

[walkitout]

And I think we might be over a pretty big developmental hump. He's starting to outgrow the 18 months clothes, when up until a couple weeks ago they were still hanging on him, so he grew a bunch, mostly in his torso. His face looks different again. He's got a ton more teeth all of a sudden (being defined as over the last several weeks). Today he's taken to sticking his tongue out at me and going nnnnnn. He's using a bunch of words to ask for things (more, banana, turkey, juice, bread -- many of these intelligible now to R. as well as me). He's even verbalizing a request to nurse, when before it was always just trying to wrestle into position and drag my shirt up or down -- it sounds like bubba, which is kinda funny. And his "more" now has an r at the end, instead of just being muh. Papa is still missing the initial p, and uh oh continues to be his favorite word. He is increasingly bored with Teletubbies and starting to be fascinated by Blue's Clues.

Then last night, after weeks of nursing every half hour or hour through the night, he slept for probably four hours in a row, maybe longer (I don't know; I was asleep too).

I'm thinking maybe he was working on a whole lot of stuff for the last several weeks. Maybe we'll get of a break now while he works on language. He's been interested in crayons and paper fairly consistently lately, so, lacking any artistic skill, I've been drawing shapes, naming colors and showing him his name written out. We had a nice little moment where he was really interested in the alphabet book (Matthew Porter's board book) pages that had the same letters as his name. He is not normally interested in that book. He hung in there with me to go over the Mama, Mama and Papa, Papa books that those were the same words as I had written down, and then that was it. Total lack of further interest in that game.