Fifteen Months

Dear Ethan,

To be blunt, it's been a much better month! There has been much less screaming, less illness, and a lot more fun! And it all traces back to one thing: Communication! This month has shown huge strides in your ability to let us know what you want. From signing to talking, your vocabulary exploded this month. You sign every time for "more" (which basically means "I want" now), "eat," "hungry," "drink," "nurse," and "outside," and you're picking up signs readily now, which means I need to study up to add more to your repertoire. You're also talking a lot more. Almost daily, you say "Mama," "Dada," "Bye-bye," "Kitty," and "Book." This month you've also added "Doggy," "On," "Off," "Hi," "Belly," and "Bellybutton" to your common words. The last one is my favorite because it's always accompanied with you lifting up your shirt and pointing to it! It's so much fun to listen to you talk to us, and I know it makes you happier to be able to tell us what you want.

Unfortunately, you still don't often know what you want to eat. I've almost given up on getting you to eat balanced meals in favor of just finding something you'll eat. As a result, while you get a lot of fruit, some yogurt, some vegetables, and some meat each week, a big portion of your diet comes in the form of cereal, organic "goldfish," and organic graham cracker snacks. I still can't figure out why you won't eat any meat I cook but will eat certain meats from restaurants. Surely my cooking isn't THAT bad! Hopefully we'll get past this picky toddler phase quickly, as it's starting to test my patience.

You're still taking two naps a day, though each one is down to about 1.25 hours. I miss those 2+ hour naps, but maybe we'll get them back once you finally decide to drop down to one nap a day. I never thought I'd want you to sleep less, but when all of your little friends dropped their morning nap months ago, it makes it really hard to schedule any play dates!

And we finally have time for play dates since today marked the end of the semester for Mommy! That means almost a month (and maybe more than a month depending on whether or not my Monday class is making up for MLK) of no school work, no classes, nothing to distract me from playtime with my little munchkin! That doesn't mean the next month won't be busy, though! We've got Christmas, then a trip to Atlanta, which means a lot of family time and seeing relatives who haven't seen you since you were 3 months old! My how you've changed since then! And I know that by the time I'm writing another letter to you, you will have changed even more. But what will never change is just how much we love you and how precious you are.

Love,
Mommy