Livia continues to grow like a little weed; she just had her 15 month appointment, and she is, once again, at the top percentiles for height and weight (35.1 inches-79th percentile and 25 lbs 13 oz.-92nd percentile), but I am not really surprised since we realized recently that Livia is my baby doppelgänger. Speaking of which, I just have to put this picture in here. It’s a side by side comparison of me and Liv at roughly the same age:
Isn’t that nuts?! I get such a kick out of that. Since she was born, everyone has told me that she looks just like Marc, but this picture proves them all wrong.
And Livia is right on track with all of her developmental milestones. She is quite the talker; Livia can say: dog, duck, truck, ball, baby, dada (but she usually just yells, “DAAA! DAAA!), drink (which sounds more like “jink”), no, touch, book, that, walk, and she can almost say cracker, but I think that only Marc and I would know what she was saying/asking for if she said it. And she can say a bunch of animals sounds: quack, meow, moo, hoo-hoo, cock-a-doodle-do (she says cock-a-doo), roar, woof, tweet, buzz, baa, maa, and neigh. Oh, and she’ll make a raspberry sound if you ask her what an elephant says. And she only says “mama” if she’s upset, like, really crying upset. Oh, and when she drops something, or something falls, she’ll look at it and say, “Oh,” instead of uh-oh. It’s super adorable and super irritating at the same time because she’ll drop food on the ground and–knowing that she’s not supposed to do that–point to the food (or fork or cup) and say, “Oh,” in the cutest way possible. And she can sign “more” and “all done,” which is a tremendous help. And she will say hello, which sounds more like “herro,” if you hand her a phone, and, I am telling you, it is the most adorable thing, but I am, admittedly, pretty biased.
Livia is definitely going to be another book worm. Sitting and reading is her favorite thing to do. And, regardless of where she is standing, if you hand her a book, she will sit down right where she is and start looking through it. Her current favorite is “Gossie and Gertie,” a book about two ducks who are best friends. She is obsessed with ducks right now. Every bird that she sees, she quacks at, and by quacking I mean yelling, “quack!” at the top of her lungs in rapid succession five to ten times. It’s actually pretty funny. So I found her a little duck book, “If I Were a Duck,” and little duck lovey that she carries around with her and sleeps with. And you know when she’s awake for the day when you hear her quacking in her crib in the morning or after nap. Like I said, she’s a bit obsessed. (Sorry for the super-blurry phone pictures.)
And she’s such a lover. She walks around the house giving everything kisses. She kisses me and Marc and Roman and the dogs and the toys and the books. Everything. She just walks up to you, puckers her lips, and says, “mmmmmm” until you give her a kiss back. One time at the park, a little boy was reaching around her to grab a sand toy, so she leaned in, puckered up, and kissed him. The little boy’s mom apologized because she thought the son went over and kissed her, but I told her that Livie was, in fact, the kiss instigator… oh… I see trouble on the horizon.
Without a doubt, Livia knows what Livia wants, and she is bound and determined to get it. We have hit that age in which she no longer wants to ride in the stroller; she wants to walk. But she doesn’t want to hold your hand when she walks, she wants to do it by herself. She wants you to sit down and read when she’s ready to read and will throw a book at you so that you know it’s time. She wants you to feed her when she’s ready to eat. She wants to be picked up when she wants to be picked up. It does not matter what else is happening around us; if she wants something and doesn’t get it immediately, she is going to throw a fit. But I think that this stage will be pretty short lived because she is learning to communicate more clearly, through words, signing, pointing, nodding, etc., and I remember that Roman just seemed so frustrated at this age because he knew what he wanted, but he wasn’t able to communicate it, and that is exactly where she is now. But, just like Roman, she’s figuring out how to get what she needs and is figuring out that she’ll get it more quickly if she can find a way to tell me what that is instead of, you know, crying and lying the ground pouting. She has already learned that if she points to the ground and says, “walk,” that I will (most of the time) put her down so that she can walk by herself, and she seems to understand that this is so much easier than crying about it. I think that in just a few more months she will know the words for her important things, and I am so looking forward to that.