18 Months!

Will turned 18 months old yesterday! As they say, time sure flies...feels like only yesterday I was moving to Hong Kong with a 4 month old.

He is really becoming quite the little person. He got his top 2 molars a couple weeks ago - so now he has 12 teeth and is getting increasingly capable of chewing. He still eats like a champ...although he's gotten a little pickier now that he can communicate a bit better.

His vocabulary has really taken off. He definitely understands most of what we tell him. And he's adding new words daily. He says quite a few useful things - water, yogurt, fruit, pasta, up, down, carry you (which really means carry me), stroller, cars, ball. And he's added lots of other miscellaneous words - moon, head, toes, chair, shoes, dance. There are definitely many more, but he's adding them at such a rate that it is hard for me to keep up. Of course he doesn't pronounce or enunciate all that well yet - so I often understand him mostly by context and familiarity.

Will had his 18 month check-up this morning. He got 2 injections - one in each arm - and he was a champ - started to scream, I stuck a lollipop in his mouth and all was forgotten. He's grown a bit in the month since he was at the doctor last - now 13.8 kg (30.4 lbs) and 86 cm (almost 34 in). The doc said he looks all healthy - nothing to worry about.

Leah is also doing well - working on numbers and letters at school and just starting their reading program. This week we are meant to be working on the "sight words" and, a, I, the - and Leah seems to already know them a bit. She now brings home a book a week. This week's book is just pictures - and we are supposed to use it to tell a story. Gradually we'll get into the books with simple words and sentences. She's definitely very excited to learn to read. We've also started talking about addition, as they are doing that a bit at school. I taught her how to put the fingers from one hand and the other together to help add small numbers and she's very excited to show off her new skills.

We all enjoyed Halloween. Leah was Sleeping Beauty and Will was Winnie the Pooh. They got a ton of candy that I will be gradually parceling out to them over the next few months.