More about Auletta

So it's the beginning of March and we're bracing for what will probably be the worst snowstorm of the winter. Blargh. After this, two winters down and one to go (and don't even suggest that we could end up living in the Northeast after Justin finishes law school or I'll cry).

Anyway. Auletta is coming up on 17 months. A lot's been happening the past month or so. We used to think she really liked it when we read to her, and then she started crawling and we realized she had just sat still for books because she couldn't move. Now she is back to sitting still for books, so we read to her a lot more. She often wants to read the same book over and over and over...and it's odd books too, like The Story of Abraham Lincoln and Good Night, Seattle, which aren't the good old Eric Carle and Margaret Wise Brown books we raised her on, back when she didn't have opinions. But I am happy just to have her enjoying books, and she certainly likes to play with them, pile them on top of me and Justin when we're all in bed together, etc.

She is also fascinated with shoes and attempts to put on any shoe she can find, whether it's her size or not. She has a pair of crocs that will fit her perfectly this summer; they're a little big on her right now, and she's very good at putting them on by herself (not always on the right feet, of course). She also finally decided she will consent to wear hats and even have me put hats (yes, plural) on her, so hopefully that means I will no longer be that horrible mother who lets her child go out in the cold or sun without a hat, a topic on which I have received unsolicited advice from strangers in the past.

Her receptive language is also coming along nicely. She follows simple instructions (at least sometimes, and when she feels like it), and she can identify numerous body parts (again, when she feels like it)--nose, ear, hair, hand, fingers, belly button, knees, feet.

We are still a little worried about her speech. She says "yes," "no," "boo" (really more like "ba!"), and that's about it, as far as I can tell. She has a really sophisticated jargon we call Blurt (sounds better than Aulettish), which she often speaks to other babies, although apparently her Blurt and their Blurt are mutually unintelligible. So she has no trouble understanding English, or forming all sorts of phonemes in her own language, but she doesn't really seem interested in imitating English words. Her pediatrician said we could discuss this at her eighteen-month appointment if it continued to be an issue, and that's coming up in mid-April, so hopefully she will be speaking words by then, but if not at least hopefully we can start dealing with whatever speech issues she has (and maybe there isn't really an issue, but Justin and I have high expectations) sooner rather than later.