21 Months - Sentences and EIEIO!

If months were years, my daughter would be able to take a legal drink :-P. Good thing they aren't, or else we would have had a crazy Easter last night :-P. In three months she will be 2, and occasionally I will read about things that your child *should* be doing by their second birthday. Not that I care about standard milestones or that I think passing those milestones means that Jocelyn is a genius, but she has blown pretty much all of them out of the water! She is supposed to know 20 words - a few animals, foods, baby, Mommy, Daddy, etc. Jocelyn has blown WAY past 20 words. She knows her basic colors (spectrum plus black, white, brown and pink), all of her farm animals, many of her shapes, several pieces of furniture and household items, different rooms, foods, and lots of random objects. She's getting better at names. She can say "Grandpa", which she said for the first time while we were on the phone with him (so that was cool!) and yesterday she busted out a "Jeff." Now we need to work on my family, but that will come with time. She can also say "Donovan", which is awesome. She also knows "Dakota" and "Pumpkin" and all of the Sesame Street characters.

Today she gave her first complete sentence. She said, "I need to wash." She loves to wash her hands. It's cute. But also a pain in the neck. I found a step stool to buy, I just need to go to Buy Buy Baby to buy it :-P. I also mostly made a sink nozzle extender, I just need to make one more hole in a part that is hard to cut.

She must have started to learn "Old MacDonald" at daycare. We sing it around here sometimes, but not that often, and I started to sing it more recently when she started to say "E-I-O" or just "I-O." Recently, though, she says "Buck buck buck buck E-I-E-I-O." It is precious! It's super duper cute.

The other big news is that she seems to be interested in using the potty. She hasn't used it, and she's afraid of the big toilet. But she tells us when she needs to go to the bathroom, and also tells us after she has gone in the bathroom. So I bought her an Elmo potty, just so she can start to see it. We'll see how it goes. I'm not planning to start toilet training until she is in a big girl bed, but I figure I can let her sit on it, play around it, get used to it, etc. If she uses it as a potty, then great. If not, then that's fine too.

We recently had Easter and all of the fun stuff that comes with it (we're not Christian, but Mike was raised Christian and my mom is Christian, so we both grew up with Easter). We don't go to church, and we don't observe Lent, but we eat candy :-). Anyway, we had to buy plastic eggs to take to daycare. Before we took the eggs to school, before she ever did an egg hunt, it seemed as though she knew just what to do. As soon as Jocelyn saw them she pointed to them and said, "yummy!" How did she know? She had no experience with Easter eggs. How did she know there were tasty treats inside? So funny1

she did love her egg hunts. Her first hunt was at daycare, which was cute. It was a bit chaotic because there were older kids as part of it. She got a few pieces of candy. Mike let her have a few right away, and then ditched me with her while he went back to work (uncool, daddy!). We had another one at home on Sunday. We re-hid the eggs that she found at school, plus a few others that we put Mini-Reese's Peanut Butter Eggs into.

Jocelyn still loves her books. She can tell us many of the titles, so we know exactly what she wants to read. And she can sometimes read to us - she will point to the different things happening in "One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish" and describe them ("black fish" "yellow hat" "old fish" "running" "hello" etc.). She calls "Green Eggs and Ham" "Sam" (she used to call it "I am").

Oh, and she can count to three! She goes "one, two, three." It's awesome!

We still have lots of tantrums. And some jealousy over her baby brother (directed at us, not him). And the other bad habit she picked up (from Grandma, but then we encouraged it) is watching Sesame Street clips on You Tube. It started with a few Elmo songs. Then we expanded to other characters. She has her favorites. Anyway, it started getting to where she was choosing videos over other activities that she used to love - like playing outside and reading. So now we limit the number of video clips we can watch er sitting and the number of sittings.