Violet at 17 months

This has been an amazing month for Violet. I feel that she has grown so much. Maybe it was the trip or just the age, but she's really developing into her own little person.

She is talking a ton right now. She says "hot," "cold," "outside," "swing," "water," "milk," "gentle," "book," "sock," "shoe," "hat," "boat," "choo-choo," "me," "you," "backpack." She also says all the vowels when she's imitating me and Jack: A E I O U. She sings along when she hears "The Wheels on the Bus," the ABC song, and "Itsy Bitsy Spider," complete with hand gestures and dance moves. One of my favorite things that she says is "Ian," which is the name of one of her little friends. It's the first name other than "Mommy" that she says perfectly intelligibly.

She is definitely getting a little temper, which is at turns funny and frustrating to me. There are days when she hates getting into her car seat. When I put her in, she'll stand up and yell, "No no no!" When I finally am able to get her seated and strapped in, she cries for several minutes. That is a phase that I am really hoping passes quickly.

She is also perfecting the passive resistance technique, where she will basically go limp when she doesn't want to do something. Thankfully, she is still pretty little, so it's not totally awful just scooping her up and making her do whatever it is I want her to do.

Of course, one of Violet's favorite pastimes is to imitate whatever her brother is doing. If he does a somersault, she tries to do one. If he jumps up and down, she starts bouncing. If he bangs something like a drum, she absolutely has to do it too.

Another aspect of this "monkey see, monkey do" behavior is that she wants whatever anyone else is having. Anything to drink that isn't water is "juice" to her. So whenever she sees any of us drinking anything, she says, "Want juice!" A lot of things are "chee," and we hear, "Want chee!" all day long. This is anything from food (cheese is naturally usually one of our first guesses), TV, or to "brush teeth." We usually know when she wants to brush her teeth, though, because she will make the sign to go along with it. With everything else, we usually just follow her finger to whatever she's pointing to.

She loves being outside. She constantly is saying "ow-eye," which is Violet-ese for "outside." If she wants to go in the swing, she says, "Whee!" A couple of days ago, she figured out how to climb the ladder to our little slide and go down by herself. The next day, she figured out how to climb the rock wall ladder to our big slide. That slide is pretty high and fast, so we haven't let her go down that one by herself yet. She also likes to wash her hands ("wa" while making the sign for "wash hands"), play with balls, and read books. Both the signs and sounds for "book" and "ball" are unfortunately really similar, so sometimes it's difficult to suss out what she really wants.

One of my favorite things that she does is when Jack stands with his arms straight out to his sides, she runs up to him and gives him a hug around the waist. I love how much they love each other.

Sleep remains challenging. She typically has a big wake-up around 4:00 and one or two small ones (meaning we can at least put her back down in her crib) before that. At 4 AM, though, nothing will do but for me to bring her into bed with me. Naps are hit or miss. Sometimes she will nap for a couple of hours; other days it will only be around 40 minutes. Sometimes she will sleep in her crib, and other times it takes driving her around and leaving her in her car seat to get her to nap. I console myself with the idea that we had such sleep issues with Jack, but now he is a great sleeper (at least at night).

She only had six teeth for the longest time (four on top and two on bottom), but all of a sudden she has sprouted five more. She has two molars coming in on the top, two on the bottom, and then one of the bottom lateral incisors (I totally had to look that last name up). She hasn't really let the lack of teeth stop her from eating, but she will occasionally spit out something if it's too big a bite for her.

Now that fall is here, Jack will be going back to preschool. I'm hoping that Violet and I will be able to have some one-on-one girl bonding time. I did so much with Jack when he was her age, and she has definitely missed out on that. It will be fun to see how much more she will learn in the next few months.