General Update: April

Age (in months, or years and months): 18.5 months
Physical abilities: learned to open round doorknobs, climbs in and out of the bathtub for about a month now, walks up and down steps independently w/o holding on, but she will still turn around and crawl down them at times. She climbed up a ladder in the store the other day before daddy saw her, and climbed the ladder like bars on the playground that were very widely spaced. I introduced her to stacking pegs and she has enjoyed manipulating them. Is using a pretty good pencil grip now.
Speech/language: vocabulary, sentence length, etc: has doubled her speaking vocabulary to around 140 words in the last month but pronunciation is still unclear. My favorite new word is “please” for obvious reasons.
Reading/pre-reading: asks for books by name/content now, we are reading a lot of I Spy books and she is really good at identifying most things on the page. This is helping a lot with her vocabulary too although her receptive language is far greater than her oral. She is also really into books about bugs, spiders, and animals
Number stuff: no changes, still counts 123
Other cognitive stuff: puzzles, reasoning, etc: has determined that if she pushes enough buttons, eventually the DVD player will play her favorite one. Also knows how to turn on the cell phone that we used to let her play with. We had been turning it off so she wouldn’t call anyone, but now she can get around that. Excellent at matching games. We’ve started playing a modified version of Memory using only 4-6 cards at a time.
Creativity: Loves her art time as usual, although she is drawing on herself much more and enjoying being messy.
Imagination: Starting to make connections and apply real world knowledge instead of just copying. For example we took the dog for a walk the other day on her leash (we never use it usually) Piper carried the leash around for the next week along with her stuffed doggie. Made her dog toys kiss each other which was really sweet. I have no idea where she got that from
Social: not much interaction lately with other kids
Character/personality: Very loving and sweet lately, giving lots of kisses and hugs. Is requesting to be carried more when usually she doesn’t want to cuddle or be held much.
Anything else/other: I was off work this week for spring break so I would put her in my bed first thing in the morning so I could sleep in a little later. I was woken up several times this week by her poking me in various parts of my body and naming them for me, including trying to pry open my mouth to name my tongue and teeth. She’s known her body parts for months now, but I love that she’s finally able to articulate the words herself now. The language explosion has been great