16 month baby update
Goodness me the last month has gone quickly! We're edging even closer to the 18 month mark, which is amazing really. During the past month, Daph has been an absolute dream. She's emerged from the recent grumpy screaming phase and is instead incredibly happy most days and incredibly sweet. Which is brilliant. She's even decided she doesn't mind going to the supermarket anymore, and the tantrums have subsided. (For now. I know, as ever, everything is a phase, even the good times).
This month her speech has come on leaps and bounds. She has a whole repertoire of words now, including: tea, Purdy (Percy the cat), Poph (my sister's name*), Daddy, teddy, bath, ball, hi, bunny, poo poo (when she's having her nappy changed), Dee Dee (the model in the Hush catalogue - have I mentioned here that she is OBSESSED with her?!)... I think that's about it. Still no Mummy but I get random variations of things instead, such as Bobby, Uddy, and just Bob, which I think is my favourite. Bless her.
This week she finally started standing without support, but it's still only for a few seconds before it's almost as though her brain figures it out, panics and she drops to her bum. She has an incredibly long back and quite stumpy legs for her height actually, so I am sure that doesn't help. Also, the muscles in her legs don't seem very big (literally, she has quite scrawny legs), but hopefully they'll keep growing and developing! I SO wish she could walk because she weighs an absolute ton, but she's a master crawler and moves at lightning speed, so she clearly doesn't see any great need to start using her feet instead. We measured her the other day and tried to plot her on the red book, and she's on the 87th percentile for her age, which is crazy when she was on the 2nd when she was born! I can't believe how tall she's getting now - the leggings I bought for her in the autumn are all coming up short already, and she's filling out 18-24 month babygrows. Madness.
Every time I do a baby update and I boast how her sleep's been good, the next day it goes to shit. So I am VERY reluctant to tempt fate here but... her sleep has been the best it's been ever in the past week. She's been going down easily at 7pm, and sleeping through until somewhere between 6am and 6.30. We've had a couple of early wake ups (like 5.30 etc) which I still find absolutely killer, but in the past few days it's been amazing really. I'm fairly confident now that I've written this that tonight will be an absolute disaster but anyway, thought I'd mark this time for posterity and to remind myself that it wasn't all totally helpless when I look back...
The one thing we have changed to try to stop her early wake ups (on the advice of my friend and fellow mum Alice) is to wake her up after 40 mins of her morning nap. We never used to wake her - we always let her sleep as long as she wanted and wake up naturally, but this did mean she had her long nap in the morning and then a poxy short one in the afternoon, which is the wrong way round. So now we've been trying to get her to do the long nap in the afternoon instead, and it's a bit hit and miss, but waking her up from her morning nap does seem to have done something weird to her brain and helped her sleep in later in the morning, which is great.
However, I'm fairly sure this rosy patch won't continue as I keep hearing all about the bloody 18 month sleep regression. It's like some awful hurdle looming on the horizon - I can't bear it! I think I'd rather not know. It's also going to coincide with Daph starting at the childminder's, so I'm fairly sure February is going to be an exhausting month for all of us... *tries to think positive - we WILL be one of those lucky families that skips it entirely! we will we will we will!!*
One last slightly weird thing - Daph has started holding her wee in when she has a bath. It's so funny, when we get her out of the bath now, she's desperate to get her nappy on to relieve herself, and genuinely seems so relieved when she can finally wee. My mum thinks this is a sign she's ready to be potty trained but seeing as she can't walk yet I'm not entirely convinced. It's interesting though, and just another reminder of how quickly she's growing up. Sob.
So yes, on the whole, this has been a bloody LOVELY month - Daph is happy, chatty, relaxed and eating and sleeping well. If babies were like this all the time I'd have hundreds of them. Maybe.
*my sister's name is actually Sophie, but when *I* was a littlun I couldn't pronounce it, so I used to call her Pophie, which got shortened to Poph. Pronounced to rhyme with Soph, in case there's any confusion (people always think it's Pop-h or something!)