21 Months

Hello all!

Here's the latest Julia updates:

• Julia's vocabulary continues to expand on a daily basis. It's amazing how much she understands and the number of words she says. We continue to update the list at the right, but I am sure there are quite a few words missing. It's hard to keep up! One of the most exciting expansions of her vocabulary has been the addition of the names of her family members. She can identify pictures of and name Marmee, Pops, Gramma, Grampa, Uncle Sean, Aunt Becca, James, Baby Sophia, Uncle Peter, and Aunt Molly. We are still working on Aunt Laura, Aunt Jocie, and Uncle Dan (actually, Julia pretty frequently calls Aunt Molly AND Uncle Dan "Aunt Molly"!).
• Julia's level of comprehension of the world around here is pretty awesome, too. For example, I have worked quite a few night shifts lately. According to Jonathan, Julia spends a lot of the time I am sleeping during the day saying, "Mommy... sleep! sssshhhhhh!"
• Julia likes to video chat with her family. :-) A week or two ago, when we came home from Kindermusik, she walked over to the computer, climbed up in the chair and said, "Becca, Baby, James!" And today she's still talking about the nice conversation she had with Grampa and Elmo yesterday.
• Something new Julia has learned to do is "sneaking." I'm not sure how it started, but especially at bedtime, Julia likes to sneak up on Daddy to say good night. As soon as she's done with her bedtime nursing, she says "sneak! sneak" We hold hands and creep along as she whispers "sneak." Then when she gets close to Daddy, she yells "aaaahhhhh!!!" and runs up to him. Then we have to sneak up on Baby. :-) Julia's also learned that Mommy kisses make any owie all better. :-) And she's started to show an interest in learning the alphabet, so we are working on that a little. She has magnet letters on the refrigerator that she likes to play with while I'm working in the kitchen. For some reason, the "O" has been her favorite letter to carry around, so that's the first letter she learned to say/recognize.
• Julia continues to be rather shy at Kindermusik class, but it's neat to see how much she's absorbing in class by what she demonstrates here at home. She loves to listen to her CDs here at home, she's starting to sing along with some of the songs, and there are certain songs that we always have to dance to together. She got some great animal puppets from Grandmom and Grandad at Christmas that work really well with some of the Kindermusik songs, so we have a great time having the animals dance and singing the songs together. Some of Julia's other favorite toys/activities are books (of course), playing ball, building block towers, and walking Baby in her stroller.
• Julia is the only one in this house that might be a bit disappointed when spring finally arrives! We have had her out in the snow a couple times this winter (it's been hard to find a day with safe temps/wind chills to be outside for any length of time), and she has absolutely loved it every time. She thinks the snow is AWESOME. She walks in it, sits in it, makes snow angels in it, and picks it up. And she screams bloody murder when it's time to come inside. Hopefully she'll be reconciled to the loss of the snow when she realizes the warmer weather will allow her to be outside much more often.

I will post some more pictures next, including pictures of Julia playing in the snow that I'm not sure made it on here. I think there are also a couple new videos for Jonathan to post. Love and miss you all!