18 Months!

I can't believe my big boy is already a full year-and-a-half old! He grows more precious every day, and I mean it. He is so active and ornery, this is the only nice picture we got from our 18-month photo shoot last week. We got some other cute funny-face ones which will be on our Christmas card, so some of you can keep an eye in the mail for those in December.

He's STILL teething - he's been working on his incisors for two full months now, and they're STILL not in! Here he is chewing on the prop at his 18-month photo shoot. The tooth bumps get larger and larger, though, so hopefully we'll have a breakthrough soon!

I waited a couple days to post this update so that I could post his stats from our well visit today.

Weight: 33 lbs, 8 oz (>95%)
Height: 35" (95%)
Head: 19.25" (75%)

So as you can see, he remains large and in charge. I thought this picture I took last week did a good job of demonstrating how tall he his. Poor guy can't even sleep sideways in his crib anymore without his legs dangling out of it!

His vocabulary has absolutely EXPLODED this month. I thought about trying to compile a list of words he could say to post here, but seriously, there are too many to count! He's blowing us away with the way he's starting to communicate verbally. It's awesome!

He's also learning and picking up things so fast! Seriously, this child can count to 10! (Well, he can count from 2 to 10. He has yet to say the number 1.) This video was taken when he first started doing it a few weeks ago, so his numbers are much more intelligible now. But seriously!

I didn't crop off the end of this video because if you hang on until the very end, you can catch him saying the words "All done" along with the sign when he's done with his meal. So big! *Edit: Upon viewing the video after I published the blog, it seems like "Done" got cut off in the uploading. So you just have an extra 9 seconds of looking at my cute boy. You're welcome.

He just in the past couple of days showed us that he has started learning his letters! We were bowled over. He has a little magnetic alphabet set on the refrigerator, and the other day he pulled off the letter F and said, "F." I was like "WHAT?!?!" So I asked him "What letter is this?" and he said "F." No way. Since then, we've discovered that he also knows T, and he sometimes gets S and Z. For real. That's like... reading.

His play has started to become more creative and imaginative. Instead of just holding the car upside down and spinning its wheels, he'll actually scoot it across the floor and say "Vroom." Here he is playing with a little kitchen set I got him.He gets a big kick out of it when I hold the little frying pan over the stove and say "Sizzle, sizzle, sizzle!"

So he is just a laugh a minute, and he's such a loveable, sweet boy! We remain proud of him and are astonished at not only how big, but how grown up he is! Definitely not a baby anymore.