What a fun age! Zoe continues to get bigger (34 lbs, 34 inches at last count) and become more and more like a little person.

The most major changes we’ve seen lately involve her communication skills; she’s constantly talking, and her sentences are getting longer and more complex. She recently learned to express what she wants (“I want a banana” was her first such sentence), and she often – without being asked – describes items she sees around the house (e.g. “Daddy shirt”). She has been saying “please” for a few months now, and we recently taught her to say “thank you,” which she often says without being prompted. A few other word-related things:

-When she wakes up in the morning, she usually calls out “Daddy/mommy, where are you?” And the first thing she says when we pick her up is, “I want milk.”
-She’s often saying to us, “I want mon-kee” or “I want ba-bee,” which means she wants to see her favorite Playhouse Disney characters on the TV or computer.
-Any time I sneeze she’ll say, “bless you, Mommy.” (This started a few weeks ago – after hearing us say “bless you” after every one of her sneezes for the past 21+ months!)
-She constantly says “hi” and “bye” to things – she likes, for example, greeting the birds outside her window. (And when they’re not there, she usually says, “birdies, where are you?” or “birdies night-night.”) The other day as we were walking through the garage, she waved and said “bye, stroller” to the pink stroller sitting there.
-She said, “I love you, Mommy,” for one of the first times the other the day.

Words aren’t the only things Zoe has been learning. She’s beginning to get a grasp on numbers: a few weeks ago she said “two doggies” when looking at a picture, and now she routinely points out when there is two of something. She’s more skilled at puzzles and shape-related activities than before, and she is also gaining an understanding of colors. (Every time we ask her the color of something, she answers yellow, purple or, occasionally, green, which makes us chuckle. It’s good she gets the concept of color, and we know she’ll get them all right eventually.)

Like other kids her age, Zoe is very much into imitating people around her. She repeats many of the words she hears me and Q say, and she has also started following our actions. The other day, Q was standing with his arms crossed; Zoe saw him and promptly positioned her arms in the same way. And she often “folds” and then carries around her little towels – probably because she sees me doing laundry.

She has a good memory for things. Zoe often sees Aunt Sandy’s dog, Coco, on Skype – so now she’ll sometimes point to the computer and say, “Co-co!” As mentioned before, after sitting in the stairway and waiting for her dad just one time (with Safta), she now routinely sits on those stairs and chants her dad’s name.

In terms of playtime, one of her new favorite things is Play-Doh. (She often asks for “pizza” when she wants to play, because she uses Play-Doh to “bake” at Elena’s.) She also recently started playing the “laundry” game, where she takes a stack of washcloths, unfolds each one and hands them to me to fold again. (Let’s just say that she enjoys that game more than I do.) She also loves caring for (feeding, wiping, changing diaper, etc.) her baby and her new doggie, which Q got for her on Labor Day weekend. (She loves that dog and sleeps with it every night.)

We’ve mentioned it before, but Zoe can be temperamental. And (like other toddlers), she has shown a recent fondness for throwing food on the floor. Whenever she does this (or other “naughty” things) she knows to say “sorry” and kiss her mom or dad; it’s hard to stay angry/irritated when you see her little face coming towards you!

-M

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 23rd, 2008 at 7:00 am and is filed under 26.Twenty-two months. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.