Kayla's 19 months

I can't believe how fast Kayla is growing! At 8 months she was just crawling and discovering the things right around her. She has been walking since just before we celebrated her first birthday and we even had our first trip to the hospital after she climbed up on a chair and fell head first onto the concrete porch. She cried (of course) and vomited so we rushed to the emergency room and the pediatrician said she had a mild concussion. We had to keep her calm and gave her baby Tylenol while we monitored her for several days. I hope we never have to go through that again and I am glad that there seem to be no long term effects.

Kayla is very comfortable with me and has become more willing to try new things when I am around. Now that she is so secure we are working on building that same relationship with her father. We tried this thing called the object permanence test with Kayla a few months ago so we thought we would try it again and see if it went differently. Boy did it. This time, Kayla was able to find her doll even after looking a long time and seems to think that this was a great game! It is so simple! All we do is hide her doll under her pillow or in her dresser. When she finds it we hid it in the other location and switch back and fourth. She no longer has the problem we saw earlier of searching at the more common of the two hiding places. We can't even trick her by hiding it in our hands or behind our back.

When Kayla turned 15 months we notice she often studies things around her and performs simple little "experiments" with them. She is almost like a little scientist. For example, she pushes her bath toys under water at various depths and delightedly watches how high they pop back above the surface.

At around 18 months Kayla starting showing an interest in the toilet so we thought we would start to introduce the potty training process. We just praise her for small steps such as trying on the training pants and sitting on the potty chair, even if nothing "happens" so that when she is ready they will be familiar to her. Sooner the better so we don't have to worry about diapers.
Kayla is also very interested in music. She often dances to our favorite music, and tries to clap or sing along with songs that we sing or that are even played on TV. We have been working on some short little preschool songs and we all enjoy dancing or moving around together to the music. I also really enjoy showing Kayla how to take care of the plants on the sunny balcony of our apartment.

Kayla has been showing some interesting new behavior. She has developed a wonderful vocabulary which probably accounts for her socialness with other people. But she uses the word "me" a lot, and wants to do things herself. It is good she is discovering herself as a person and want her to have that healthy independence, but we are also making sure she knows there are certain rules she has to cooperate with which helps her practice her self control. It is as always a balancing act but she seems to be developing well in this area so we will keep doing what is working.

At 19months now Kayla is able to imitate actions or words that she has seen or heard days before. This is really cool and it is great to see her increased ability to learn new things. Kayla also seems to be aware of basic categories, such as big or little, and blue or red. You can tell because of the way she is sorting her toys.

Although we are going to continue going to our regular play groups we wanted to start looking into a preschool and one we liked had an assessment that Kayla was able to do. We didn't want to put her in a situation when she wasn't comfortable but she was excited to be there so we went thorugh with the assessment. Some of the things we learned were that Kayla was not very aggressive with the other kids, unless one of them tried to grab a toy from her and then she resisted. Typical. I would resist if someone grabbed something from me. We need to work on better communication with Kayla in that we try to read her reactions more carefully. We also need to make sure that we use clear and simple explanations for rules, warnings and time-outs for misbehavior. In return we need Kayla to 'use her words' if she wants something. The specialist noted that Kayla readily engaged with her socially and made good eye contact. Yea! Most importantly Kayla seemed at ease with the examiner and seemed friendly and outgoing with children in the group. We all agreed that she should adapt well to preschool. Although she had a lot of energy running around with the other children, it was all used up because she took a nice long nap when she got home.