Carter - 17 Months

I can’t believe our little one is 17 months old.  We’re a mere one month away from having a 1 1/2 year old.  That is just so incredibly unbelievable to me for some reason.  But then again, I say that every month.  So basically, 17 months really is the best age ever.  I’ve been saying that since month 12 though.  I love me a newborn baby y’all, don’t get me wrong, but there is nothing like playing with my sweet boy in the water or in the dirt or just watching him learn how to use his hands and feet in a more advanced way.  He is so much fun to be around and I gotta say, I absolutely LOVE having a boy.  So here’s some things that happened this month:

• Carterman does all kinds of weird things that makes mommy and daddy laugh:

• He’s a big lover of the slide these days and it is his number one choice for what he wants to do on the playground.  Swinging on the swing got pushed back to number 2.

• On the left, Carter is quickly figuring out how to use a spoon.  We’ll give him a spoon and some kind of food and he’ll take one tiny piece of food, put it on the spoon then put the spoon in his mouth.  He used to lose the food on the spoon because he tried to put it in his mouth too fast and the food fell off the spoon.  He’s figured out that he has to do it slowly so he’s gotten much better at it.
• On the right, we got Carterman his first hat from Old Navy and, shockingly, he actually wears it. Sometimes the bill gets in his view of something and he’ll take it off, but for the most part he keeps it on!

• He figured out how to stand on top of his bumpers this month and now he is constantly doing it.  At some point I know I’ll have to take them out because he’ll use it as leverage to climb out of the crib.  Oh and the climbing.  Carter climbs everything now.  He is constantly lifting up one leg to try to put on top of something (like a big toy) to climb on.  He even figured out that if he moves his little red chair next to our couch in the living room, he can climb onto the red chair and then further up the couch.  He’s a climber!

 

• We had a family day at the zoo.  Carter had a lot of fun as usual.  He really likes the zoo!

• We bought him a Pirate Ship water table for the back porch.  May have been a mistake because now all he wants to do is go outside and play in the “otter” (water).  We have figured out that it’s just easier to let him play in his diaper.  Otherwise we’ll have clothing changes multiple times a day.

• Mother’s Day was this month and I sure had a great one!  I got lots of sweet gifts from Justin and from my wee man.  On the left is a quick picture I took of us while riding on the golf cart on Mother’s Day after church.  And yes, he still LOVES the golf cart.  On the right is a picture of the card they made for all the mothers of babies in Carter’s school class.  They only have four babies in the infant class and three of them are ours (Carter and Carter’s twin cousins, Cynthia and Celia).
• Carter’s lower molars that started coming in during the awful first family vacation where he developed a double ear infection and the croup virus are fully in now.  I guess Carter’s pain was consumed by the ear infection and the virus because other than those couple of days, he never showed any pain.
• His upper molars cut through on May 20th (ish) and again, he never showed an ounce of pain with them.  I only noticed them one day when I was changing his diaper and he just so happen to have his mouth open looking up so I got a good view of the pearly whites staring right back at me.  I am in disbelief that he now has all four of the first year molars and they never affected him.  He now has 12 teeth and most of them never caused him to be fussy.  For him, the worst were the upper four incisors.  He cut all four at the same time so I can imagine that was painful.
• Carterman loves stairs.  He practices going up and down the two brick steps going from our kitchen into our back porch.  He just does it over and over and over.  We hold his hand when he’s coming down of course, but he’s capable of crawling up them on his own.  Towards the end of the month, he’s actually starting to hold the railing when coming down the steps instead of holding onto us.
• We went to the pool for the first time of the 2013 year.  The last time Carter went to the pool was when he was around 7 or 8 months old maybe.  He was LOVING it.  He can walk now so we set him in the baby pool without a float or anything.  He initially tried to walk as fast as he does on land and the resistance of the water caused him to fall face first.  Don’t worry, we are next to his side at all times and pull him out of the water.  I think it scared him at first, but he’s fallen like that a few times since then and it doesn’t scare him anymore.  He just shakes it off and keeps on moving.  One of the pools we go to has the water spouts that come out of the ground.  Boy was he LOVING that:

• Food-wise, Carter eats pretty much everything.  We went through a little slump around the time he had croup where he was very picky of what he ate.  Even when he was better, he was all of a sudden not willing to eat certain things anymore.  But after a week or so, our little garbage disposal was back and eating everything in sight.  I will say, however, that he seems to have lost his taste for goldfish.  He won’t eat them anymore.  He’d rather have cheerios or some other “nack” as he calls it (snack).
• Developmentally, he really is jumping leaps and bounds!  He has figured out how to full blown RUN.  He also learns new words everyday.  His vocabulary is insane now.  He can say so many things now and he understands what he’s saying too, which is the weird part for me.  He hasn’t said a full sentence yet though, just words.  We have drilled “please” into his brain that the poor thing now says it every time he wants a bite of his dinner.  It comes out as “peas” but that’s what he means.  Anytime he wants anything, Justin or myself will say “what do you say” and he says “PEAS!” in a really excited voice.  He also knows “thank you” (comes out as “tay too”), but he doesn’t use it as frequently as he uses “please”. 
• He now knows 6 body parts (head, ears, teeth, tummy, hand and nose).  He still only knows the colors he knew last month although I do think he’s close with “red”.   After his croup, I noticed he was confusing his colors.  It was like the virus took his memory of  colors away.  So since then, we’ve essentially been “re-learning” yellow, green, blue, purple and red.  We’ve also been working on noises that animals make.   Daddy taught him what a snake says (sssssssssss) and when asked what a tiger says, he says “RAAAARRRR”.  We’re working on what a bird says (tweet tweet) as well as cow, dog and cat. 
• I am so incredibly proud of my boy, y’all.  He has figured out how to “clean up” and “pick up” after himself.  One of the books I read says that this is one of the first things you want to teach your children how to do so that a) they know how to take instruction and b) simply so that they will grow up knowing that they have to clean up their own mess.  We’ve worked on “clean up” with Carter forever, starting with the bathtub.  We have a big green frog that holds all the bathtub toys and when bathtime is over, he has to clean them up:

• Yes my son is great and wonderful (I’m a little bias), but life ain’t all peachy.  I hate reading blogs where everything people say about their kid is all the good stuff and they never mention the bad stuff.  Here’s Carter’s bad stuff:  screaming.  Right now, we’re in a screaming phase.  Half the time he’s just playing and trying to have fun.  The rest of the time, he’s just pissed he’s not getting what he wants.  Most of the time I ignore him.  I don’t want to distract him and give him something else to play with because he needs to learn that he doesn’t always get what he wants.  If he screams too long, to time-out he goes (though we haven’t had to do this yet, been close a few times, but  haven’t needed to just yet).  However I am not the perfect parent.  Sometimes I just want him to be quiet because I’m tired, so I give him food or some other toy as a distraction, however I NEVER give in.  Whatever he’s pissed that he’s not getting, he will absolutely 100% not get it if he’s screaming.  I refuse to feed that kind of behavior.
• Justin and I went to a wedding in Las Vegas this month and Carter stayed with Justin’s mom for one night and my mom for the other 3 nights.  This is the longest we’ve been away from him (well, Daddy’s been away longer, but that was the longest I’ve been away from him).  He did so incredibly well.  I don’t think he missed us at all.  I know there’s a huge debate amongst the “working mom” vs. “stay at home mom” crowds, but I will say this for the working mom; Carter has adapted to being cared for by others very quickly.  In addition to being with grandparents frequently, he’s always done well in school with his teachers.  I don’t know if that would have been the case if I had stayed at home with him.  He may have had a deeper attachment to me if I had. 
• He has discovered mom and dad’s bed.  He just LOVES to play on the pillows in our bed:

    

• Naps.  Naps have changed a bit with Carter in that he now only has one nap instead of two.  We’ve been weaning him slowly to one nap with the help of going to school on Tuesdays and Thursdays.  On those days, he has school from 9-1pm, during which he NEVER sleeps, so on those days, he only had one nap and on days he wasn’t at school, he had two.  On the days he had one nap, that nap was only an hour and a half or so.  I was nervous dropping him to one nap all the time because I wanted him to sleep more than that!  However after finally dropping one of the naps, he proved us wrong yet again.  There are days where he still only has about an hour and a half nap, but even those days, when he wakes up, he stays in the crib for at least another half hour so he’s in the crib for two hours.  But most of the time, his one nap ranges from 2-3 hours. 
• Night time sleep is still the same.  Goes to bed at 7:30pm (though sometimes he doesn’t fall asleep until after 8pm) and wakes up around 7:00-7:30am.  On the weekends and when Justin is in town, he doesn’t actually get out of the crib until almost 8:30am though, to give mom and dad enough time to move around and get ready for the day.  We have definitely been blessed with a child that knows how to entertain himself in the crib and doesn’t need to get out the second he wakes up. 
• Clothing-wise, he’s between 12 and 18 months clothes.  His 12 month ones are starting to get snug, but the 18 month ones still are too big, but we wear them anyway. 
• I weighed him yesterday and he was 24lbs, 3oz.  No idea on height though.  I’ll have to measure that and come back and update this later.