Happy 18 months to my dear sweet lady!

 The photo above was taken on my new camera with the 2 second timer.  I normally take these photos with a remote, but don't have a remote for the newbie.  So I had to use the self-timer.  Lady refused to pay attention to the camera for the 10 second self-timer, so I had to revert to the 2 second self-timer and run to our designated focus spot (absolutely NO JOKE about that term) from pushing the camera button to the spot of focus.  Most of the photos of us had my hair flying behind me as I whipped around to face the camera.

• Unscientifically, Finorah is weighing in at  28.5 lbs! (Again that unscientifically and she is refusing to cooperate at this moment in time...)  And she is 30.5 inches tall.  It’s weird to finally write that she is “tall” instead of “long”.  I guess a lot has changed since her first birthday.
• She is in size four diapers and she is still in 12-18 month clothes.  I think that we could jump up a size if we are wearing onesies.  She has a really long torso, like her mama, so the snaps at the crotch are sometimes a little difficult to snap because girlfriend has the length.
• She is still a phenomenal eater!  She will at least try anything that I put in front of her.  To “try” something, she will gingerly pick up whatever tidbit it is, stick out her tongue, and lightly tap the morsel against her tongue.  From that littlest of tastes, she decides if she wants to try the texture or not.  I cannot offer her the food to taste, she has to do it herself.  She is completely in love with blueberries, grapes, applesauce, noodles with red-sauce, ice cream & ketchup.  But she definitely likes all food.  It’s wonderful that we can go out to eat with her and I’m not concerned about the menu, knowing that she will readily eat whatever we decide to order.  In fact, last weekend, we went out as a family and she ate over half of her kiddie size portion of mac-n-cheese and put a solid dent in her fries.
• We are definitely running now.  And we are also jumping – not high, but enough to be defined as jumping.  She loves to dance and dance and dance.  She has this certain dance of choice that she does when she is really excited.  The arms go up over her head in a semi-circle of sorts and one side will drop down to a “c” and then over to a reverse “c” with her opposite legs going up sumo-style.  It’s totally awesome to watch.  When we listen to the radio, she will get anger when the song is over and a commercial comes on – she will walk up to the counter where the radio is and point up while looking at me, telling me to put another song on.  She is also starting to get into stomping, a.k.a. running in place when she gets excited.

• We now have 12 teeth with a gap between the top two front teeth (which I think is adorable).  The top and bottom four as well as having her first set of molars are all through.  And let me tell you, those molars (which came in at the beginning to middle of last month) totally blew.  She got all four at once and she was absolutely miserable.  Daycare even commented to E that something was really off about her – that she didn't laugh or play with others.  All she wanted to do was sit in the corner and play by herself.  Poor girl.  The teeth also coincided with us traveling to Ireland.
• She has had her first international trip!  Her and I had traveled by plane when she was nine months to Iowa.  But this time, we were traveling for 12 hours (including the four hour car ride to our final destination in Ireland).  She surprised me quite a bit and was an excellent little traveler.  She was a busy traveler, running up and down the halls in the airport quite a bit.  But the plane rides were pretty decent (save the last 30 minutes of our final flight home – by that point, the poor girl was quite exhausted of traveling and just wanted to be around something familiar – as was Mama).  I was very nervous about traveling that distance with her, but she proved to me that my worrying was for naught. 
• Now that she has mastered walking and running, girlfriend is working on mastering talking.  She can say “mama”, “dada”, "book", "ball", "paper", “doggie”, “meow”, “ride”, “milk”, “apple”, “hello”, “duck”, “Munkers”, “Baba (for Bishop)”.  Her latest run-in with geniusness – two nights ago, she handed me her “Gossie the Gosling” book and said “duck”.  The poor girl has to get tired of hearing me squeal “you are so smart!” at every new thing she does.  She is also the master at repeating the final word that you say.  For example, last night she repeated “ready?” when I said “are you ready?” and then “let’s go” when I said that prior to going upstairs to go to bed.  But I personally don’t constitute those as words that she says until she using them on her own. 
• Now that baby #2 is on the way, we really need to concentrate on her sleeping habits.  She still doesn't sleep through the night. It’s the same song and dance as before.  She will fall asleep in our bed, we will move her into her room and then she will wake up in the middle of the night, crying for our bed.  We have 6 months to get her to sleep in her own bed (probably sooner than that, as I know that sleeping isn't going to be easy later in this pregnancy).  I’m still working on a plan for that transition.  I’m realizing that she needs to go to sleep in her own bed initially, and not fall asleep in ours, but I’m not sure how to get her to lay down and fall asleep in her crib.  Still working on that one.