Carter - 16 Month Update

Oh Lord….Month 16 was a whirlwind. 

• Carter went on a food strike mid-way through the month and it was driving me crazy.  He didn’t want to eat lunch or dinner (he has always LOVED breakfast though - it’s his favorite meal by far).  At first I thought that the molars coming in were bothering him, but he would eat cheerios, yogurt, goldfish, blueberries, bananas, etc.  Basically he was eating all the foods he liked, but not necessarily what he needed.  So it became a battle of the will’s.  My will vs. Carter’s will.  I’m slightly ashamed to say that one night, I did send him to bed with no dinner.  He refused to eat what I tried to give him and I gave him MANY options.  He just wanted Cheerios.  I wasn’t going to give in.  So he had a bath and went straight to bed.  I was sure he’d wake up starving, but he didn’t.  I read in a book once that “if they’re hungry, they will eat” and I believe that’s true. 
• Carter bled a lot this month!  The first time, he was running from the garage into the driveway and toppled over on his face on the concrete.  Then later that same week, he was running in my in-laws backyard with Papa and tripped over a stick or something and his leg started bleeding.  It scabbed over eventually and just as it was starting heal, he tripped while walking on the sidewalk in our neighborhood and the EXACT same spot start bleeding again.  He didn’t cry any of those three times, so I guess that’s good.  This is just the beginning of having a boy I assume!
• The kid repeats everything we say and it’s caused his vocabulary to expand drastically.  There are so many things he says and knows that I can’t even list them all.  He can identify four colors: green, blue, yellow, and purple.  He loves to say (this is not an all inclusive list of every word he knows, he knows way more than this.  These are just the things he’s been saying the most this month):
  • bird
  • ball
  • “YEAH” (he likes to yell that one)
  • cow
  • Car car (this is how he says his name.  He can’t say “Carter” so he just says “Carcar”)
  • keys (and he totally knows where keys go too, because when we do give him our keys to play with, he always walks to the back door and stands on his tip toes to reach the keys to the door knob)
  • “squirrel”, except that it comes out more like “curl”.
  • “boo” while pointing to his scabbed up knee (he’s trying to say “boo boo” because that’s what I call his injuries!)
  • Even though he knows the four colors listed above, he prefers “geen” because he says it all the time.
  • When he refers to milk, he says “mooooo”.  Which is hilarious to me, because he has NO idea that cows give us milk and cows say “moo”.
  • Go.  He says this when he knows we’re about to leave to go somewhere.  He usually says the word with a little question mark at the end of it too, as if he saying “are we going mommy?’
  • Bible.  Though, he calls EVERY book a Bible.  He doesn’t quite know the difference yet.
  • Amen.  Yes, he says amen.  And I TOTALLY didn’t push that.  After our prayers at night, I always say “amen” and for some reason, he just started saying it after me and he’s been doing it ever since.  So weird, but I love it!
  • Elmo.  Lord, this kid is in LOVE with Elmo.  Funny story, he even woke up at 6am this morning yelling “Elmo, elmo!!!”.  I think it’s because he was wearing his Elmo jammies last night and when he woke up, he saw him and got excited.  Thankfully he went back to sleep.
• Carter has single handedly changed our dog’s name.  Gizmo’s new name is “good girl”.  He is so used to hearing Justin talk to the Giz and say “good girl” when she does what he says, that now Carter thinks that “good girl” is her name.  Every time he sees her or even hears her collar jingle when she’s walking, he says “good girl”.  I’ll even say “that’s Gizmo” and he responds with “good girl”.
• Sleep is the same as it always has been (minus the two awful sleep days due to sicknesses-see further down).  He sleeps at night anywhere from 10-12 hours, usually around 11ish.  He has always been content to just play in his crib until we come get him in the mornings.  Some days, he may wake up at 6:45am, but we don’t go get him until after 8.  It doesn’t bother him in the least.  He just plays with Henry and a lot of the time, he’ll just go back to sleep.  Naps vary.  Sometimes he’ll take 2-two hour naps.  Sometimes it’s 1-two hour nap and then no 2nd nap, just quiet time in the crib.  Sometimes it’s 2 – 1 1/2 hour naps.  It’s so all over the place and depends on the day.  But the fact that he still takes two naps is enough for me to not transition to one nap just yet.  My guess is that the transition will be complete this summer.  As of now, the days he goes to MDO at church, he only has one nap because he doesn’t nap at church.  So he’s technically in the process of transitioning now, but he shows too much interest in keeping that 2nd nap on the other days for me to drop it just yet.
• He had his 15 month doctor’s appointment this month.  It was a good checkup.  He got some shots (boo) one of which apparently caused a sickness 2 weeks later (more on that below).  At that appointment, he weighed 23.6lbs (25%) and was 29.75 inches tall (10%).  The height percentage was a shocker for us because he has been consistently in the 75-85% range for height his whole life, but maybe he’s just got a delayed growth spurt or something.  We do know that his 12 month stats were not correct, because if they were, then his body and head both shrank.  Maybe he’ll hit a growth spurt in the next few weeks.  We’ll see at 18 month appointment in July.  Also, he’s starting to remember the doctor’s office and what happens there.  He cried most of the time we were there.
• Our biggest fun thing this month was our very first family vacation.  Well, it started off fun, but then Carter developed a couple of sicknesses while we were there causing the end of the trip to be a bust.  You can see the Gatlinburg post here.
• The sicknesses.  So at the end of month 15, Carter developed the croup virus (the pediatric form of laryngitis).  This virus supposedly came from the MMR shot he got at his 15 month checkup.  It caused him to breakout in red spots all over his body and get a temp up to 103.  None of this came to light until day 2 of our family vacation in Gatlinburg when he started being supper cuddly and he didn’t sleep through the night (a first, with one exception, since he was 3 months old).  See the link above for more info on the trip and the doctor’s visit.  Carter is completely fine now.  His fever broke on Monday afternoon, but he was still extremely fussy and cuddly.  I stayed home from work Monday and Tuesday to take care of him, but he seemed much better and more like himself by Tuesday afternoon, so he went back to Nana’s on Wednesday.  He didn’t go to school all week because I was afraid he may spread it.  He lost his appetite SIGNIFICANTLY during the illness and we’re still trying to build it back up now.  He lost a little over a pound during the sickness.

A few pictures and fun videos from this month:

I promise every video I take isn’t during bathtime, even though it seems like it!  This video below is of Carter playing with his favorite bath toy.  It’s a float with a hole for a person to go in the float.  He is obsessed with it.  He knocks the person off and then puts her back.  And he does it slowly too, like he’s really concentrating hard on it!

And yet another bath video below.  This is of Carter saying his name, or a version of it at least:

What cracks me up about these videos is that not only does it look like bathtime is the only time I take videos, but also that green is the only fun color I make his bath!!!  I swear these weren’t taken the same day!

I have many many pictures of Carter this month, but not enough time to upload them.  They will go in another post soon.  Even though busy season is over for me, I’ve got a lot of working going on in April and May so I have very little free time right now.  I’ve been slacking not only in blogging, but also in reading my sweet friends blogs, so if you haven’t seen me comment in a while, I’m so sorry!  I’m working on it, I promise!