19 Months Old

Today, we celebrated Evie's 19 months of age by spending the entire morning at appointments.

First, her first trip to the dentist. We have been concerned about some gray spots on her teeth but learned today that her teeth are perfectly healthy and the spots are iron stains, which are most commonly found in toddlers who take iron supplements. Since Evie doesn't take supplements, it means that her love of black beans and raisins is awesome for her hemoglobin! But the spots are strictly cosmetic, so we're choosing at this point to ignore the issue and re-visit it in a year or so. Maybe at that point she'll be able to sit still for the dentist to polish off the stains. At this point, NO.

Second, a trip to the pediatrician. The doctor confirmed my suspicions that Evie is showing signs of allergies. The past few days she's had a clear runny nose, sneezing, itching and shadows under her eyes. The dark circles under the eyes were the clincher for me, since I have had allergies since childhood and have many pictures of myself with "allergic shiners." So we have samples of X*yzal syrup and hopefully they will give her some relief. The sneezing and dry cough is keeping her up at night and waking her up early from naps and nighttime sleep, much to all of our chagrin.

Oh, and Evie weighs 25 pounds at 19 months according to the doctor's scale. She's still basically in 18 month clothes, although she fits into 24 month and 2T summer clothes for the most part. When she was an infant, we received a large gift of hand-me-down clothes from a family friend. Most of the clothes were 24 months and 2T, since that was the size her youngest daughter had just grown out of. Between those clothes, gifts and my own shopping I realized a few weeks ago that Evie had 33 summer dresses in her closet in sizes 24 months and 2T. No toddler needs that many summer dresses, so we pared down and are giving away about half of them.

Evie has started playing imaginatively this month and likes to put her baby doll in her high chair and feed her air with a spoon. She also shows more interest in her L*ittle P*eople and enjoys having them go "night night" in their beds, or ride in a plane. As I was picking up last night I was amused to find that she's imaginative enough to have a dog drive the car with Robin Hood passed out in the back seat. Nice:
Evie is still a big reader, and although she has a huge board book library she really enjoys stealing Mama's books and flipping through them. I was particularly amused by her reading The Mother of all Toddler Books. Maybe she'll figure out a way to make her own diaper changes easier:
When I posted about Easter, I didn't include the following pictures of Evie's first experience with chocolate. She'd had chocolate in things before, like granola bars and a chocolate chip cookie on Valentine's Day, but she'd never had the pure, unadulterated, simple milk chocolate before. One of the items in her Easter basket was a Dove fairy bunny. She started out by making the bunny "hop, hop, hop:"
The creation of a chocoholic:
Yummy:
It's been beautiful weather here, so we are spending a lot of time outside. Evie loves to chase the dogs around and is learning (slowly) how to pedal her tricycle. My jobs are to chase her around, protect the dogs, pick up dog poo in her path and push the swing. The reward for my work is that special sparkle in her eyes when she is outside. (Oh, and for awhile this month she had scabs on both knees...which I expect to continue until she's 7 or 8 years old.) We are also getting to the park at least twice a week so that she can feed her sliding addiction.
The other developments have been in the area of speech. She is continuing to add new words and phrases almost daily. Her latest new words are "napkin" and "yucky" and her cutest new phrases are "okie dokey" and "yummy, yummy." Here is a video of the latter:

Finally, Zeph was born yesterday at 38 weeks gestation. He and his mama are doing fine physically but they can still use prayer that the custody issues will be handled smoothly and will end up in the best interest of little Zeph.