one and a quarter

Yesterday was Squirt's fifteen-month check-up at the pediatrician's office. She is **drum-roll** healthy and fantastic. Except for those pesky molars, but we try to not talk about those... Oh please, just make them go away!... For those who are interested in this sort of thing, she's still wee - 30 inches tall and a dainty 20 pounds even. She officially weighs the same as my lightest kettle bell (I coulda told you that...). Despite being petite, she is sharp as a whip and the doc marvelled at her sporadic sentence-building (remarking that most children don't string words together until their second birthday - and to think, I was worried) and ability to follow fairly abstract commands. What can I say? She's a smarty britches. But we've already discussed this in a few posts. I'm a bit concerned about her slow growth, but the doc wasn't. She eats very well at home and dismally at daycare, so I'm sure that's where the problem, if there even is one, lies. There's nothing I can do about that, though, so I'm just going to make a more concerted effort to have high-calorie, nutrient-dense snacks always available at home.

This week has been pretty fun. Squirt's been continually impressing me with her growing vocabulary. Yesterday was especially fun. When we got home from our doctor visit, our boy cat came running out to greet us. She smiled, waved, and said "hi," then started looking around quizzically. "Radar?" she asks. Then wanders through the house calling for the other cat until she finds her (obviously to Radar's dismay). She also very proudly exclaimed to me, "Hiii, I looove you!" before running off to play. I almost died right there. When reading her bedtime story, she pointed at the page and announced "duck" (and it was actually a duck). She tried to convince me that the picture of the owl was also a duck, but, while I may have been wroung about that plane/car thing, I was firm that, no, it was an owl. She finally gargled something that sounded like "ggggooowll." Ok, I'll take it. Owl.  

Squirt has also started drinking with a regular, big-girl cup! The other evening at dinner I could not for the life of me find one of her sippy cups and she was thirsty and really letting me know it. In a hurry, I just grabbed a regular cup and filled it up with water - here, have fun, we'll mop later. I watched her with fascination as she carefully picked up the cup, slowly brought it to her mouth to take a big sip, and gently sat it back down on the table, smacking her lips with satisfaction before digging into dinner. Wow. Way to go! No mopping required. I tried it again last night, just to see if it was a flook. Same result. Happy slurping, sans mopping. She, as you can see below, is pretty proud of herself, too.

On a side note, I'm in the midst of another Whole30. I'm pretty disappointed with how sloppy I've gotten with my eating (and am surprised at the associated health impacts of that) and have decided I need to re-establish a healthy relationship with my food. I expected the first week or so to be rough and full of cravings, since I'd been eating pretty much whatever I wanted whenever I wanted for a few weeks now, but so far it's been smooth sailing. It's like putting on a pair of comfortable old shoes, honestly. It feels good. It helps that Daddy-o is on board with me (mostly). As part of this, I've embarked on a quest to shake up our menu, which - even when we're being paleo - tends to revolve around a few similar meals. Don't get me wrong, they're fantastic meals! But it's not fun anymore. So I'm collecting paleo (or easily modified to be paleo) recipes that I've never tried before to throw into the rotation. Last night was our first new thing - paleo Swedish meatballs! I thought it would be a very appropriate first experiment, given our family's Scandinavian heritage. And they were a hit! Now I'm excited to start finding more traditional Scandinavian meals that we can modify, so Squirt gets a taste of Daddy's homeland. I'll let you know how it goes and might even post a few recipes or two if I find anything fantastic.

Washing down her Swedish meatballs with a big-girl cup.

Multi-tasking - brushing her teeth in the bath tub.