Belated 15 Month Birthday

Sweet Pea celebrated her 15 month birthday on Tuesday.  We visited with her pediatrician and overall she is doing very well.  Here are the highlights:

• The hand, foot, mouth disease is gone!
• She weighs 19 lbs 5oz (puts her 50-75 percentile on DS growth charts)
• 28 1/2 inches long (puts her 50-75 percentile on DS growth charts)
• Doctor recommended we try to move away from Alimentum formula to regular soy milk and we are thrilled about that shift!  Sweet Pea is liking the soy milk (original flavor is all we have tried so far) and one and a half days into it she doesn't appear to be having any reactions yet so keep your fingers crossed.  This will save us a lot of money each week and make fixing her drinks a lot easier.  Now we just have to start transitioning to her drinking it cold...
• We are going to switch reflux medications to Nexium in hopes that it does more for her than the Prevacid is doing.  We won't switch for another week or two because we need to make sure that she doesn't have a reaction to one of the vaccines she was given that we might mistake for an issue with the new medication.

Cognitively Sweet Pea is really doing well!   She is putting the plastic cookies through the slot in the milk jug and the shapes through the holes in the shape sorter container.  We help by covering up the wrong holes, but it's still great!  Sweet Pea has figured out a lot more of the things on her huge rain forest toy...putting balls into the elephant, pulling up to kneeling and playing with the ball and other toys on top of it, she even put a ball on the slide this afternoon!  This toy may be huge, but it really is great for her!



Her babbles are becoming more entertaining in that she is doing some of them with a ton of inflection.  We have fun mimicking her and she laughs so adorably when we do.

She has learned two new signs this month...please and thank you.  Yes, we have a polite little girl.  Ha!  We can't teach her milk or eat which would really be useful, but we can teach her to be polite.  Go figure!  Her thank you is the most adorable thing ever because she has combined blowing kisses with thank you so you get a kiss sound with the hand motion.  I'll try to get it on video sometime because that would be something to keep for her memory books.  Her "all done" sign is maturing as well.  It used to be just one hand and we would show her that it was supposed to be with both hands at the same time.  Now she does one hand, then switches to the other and then often finishes with the original hand again.  She knows that she is supposed to do both, just doesn't have them at the same time yet.  Baby steps!

Sweet Pea does her own kind of dancing now too.  It's all just waving the arms around frantically, but it is too cute.  She doesn't maintain it for more than a few seconds, but boy the smile she puts on when she does it!  This little girl loves her music and loves the toys that she is able to make play music by herself!

Food: Everything is still pureed, but we have brought back in squash which she used to hate.  She is eating more quantity and we just have to remember to get another container out when she finishes a jar because often she is still wanting more.

Now for a TON of photos and videos...

First are a bunch from our playdate on Sunday with the local DS support group.  It was at a great facility called NAPA Center and they had a lot of fun things for all the kids to do.  The zip line was a blast, Sweet Pea finally found a slide that she loved, we realized that a drum set may be in our future, gabbing with good friends is always a favorite of hers, a big ball pit to sink into was a fun new experience and we may need to be afraid of her taking our car keys in the future...





























And here is one of her showing off another new trick on her rain forest toy...and making sure Mommy is watching her do it.  I love that she yells at the toy at the end when it isn't doing what she wanted it to!  It shows her true colors...



And one final picture for an extra special Crazy Aunt that we can't wait to move out here in a few months...her hair really is growing!