As you know, Ellie had her one-year check-up last week, which resulted in the MMR which resulted in the fever which probably wasn't from the MMR but just some mystery virus. The fever is gone, the medicine is almost gone, but Ellie is still under the weather. We'll see how the weekend goes.
That's the bad news, the good news is that through this ordeal I learned TWO ways to say "vaccine" in Chinese, yeah!
On the day of her check-up Ellie was all healthy and hale. She now weighs 25 lbs. (11.3 kg.), which is less that a pound more than her weight at 10 months--she is finally slowing down. She is 32 in. tall (81.5 cm) which means she is now tall enough for her growth chart that starts at 80 cm. Too bad I let her play with the little butterfly that you use to mark the current height, because I can't find it now. For those interested in percentages, this puts her in the 75-90% range for weight and >95% range for height. This is the first time she hasn't been >95% for both.
Ellie is getting better and better at walking. She is very confident in her ability and brave at the same time. She particularly loves walking up and down a little inclined sidewalk in our garden here. She also likes to practice walking up and down small stairs while holding my or Jason's hand for balance. I very rarely see her crawl to get from place to place, at this point I think I would be shocked if I did.
Even better than her new walking skill is the way Ellie's cognitive ability has just seemed to take off. She really understands almost everything I say to her, and she is learning new words at an amazing rate. She can point out her nose, ear, belly button and toes. She will point out mouth and hair on me, but not herself. When we read books I ask her, "Where is the flower/sun/tree/ball/etc.?" and she can correctly point to too many objects to list.
She doesn't say many words now, at least not distinguished ones (everything is "Dah" or "Buh"), but is developing a rather large repertoire of animal noises including those for dog, cat, fish, lion/tiger/bear, elephant, seahorse, cow, alligator and bird. I suppose to be fair the alligator is really a hand signal that she does (indicating chomping jaws). Speaking of signing, we were doing well with signing, then she finally learned the sign for "please" (I was so happy). Then once she realized this was the way to get what she wanted, "please" replaced ALL of her other signs (well, except for the sign for "milk" which really means "I want to nurse").
Ellie enjoyed books before, but now she
looooves to read. I read all her books to her every day. Sometimes more than once. Jason reads all her books to her every day. Sometimes more than once. Her recent favorite is Dr. Seuss's ABCs and a book with photographs from Vermont. Her favorite animals are now elephants and lions, and she looks for them in every book (we have a suprising number of books with these animals in them, even the Vermont book has a statue of a mountain lion in it). I think we need to get some old National Geographics for her to look at because she loves animals and seems to like the real photographs better.
By far the cutest thing is to see her reading to herself and doing what the book says. For example, we have a book on body parts, and she will turn to the page about belly buttons and lift her shirt and point to her belly button. We have another book that has you do certain motions, and she will turn to the page that says, "The seal claps his hands" and start clapping. It is very cool to see her knowing and learning and remembering. Very cool.
Here she is reading one of her "special" books (i.e. not for unsupervised reading).
This book even has an elephant! (It is a picture of some African tribe killing an elephant to eat, but she doesn't know that yet.)
Another new habit, she likes to share her food with us. She will take a bite then hold it out for us to take a bite. We are still not sure if this is a control thing our just cute, we'll see if any eating struggles develop.
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