I know this is a day late, but Matt was feeling a little under the weather yesterday.
Matt is one busy 17 month old, even when a bit sick. He keeps growing in all sorts of ways. He weighs 26 pounds by now and probably has grown a little bit in length. I've switched him over to 2T shirts, although he's still wearing 24-month pants.
One of the neat things that Matt is now doing is imaginative play. Over the past few weeks he's started to pretend to eat his play food and offers food to (pretend to) eat to us or his dolls and stuffed animals. But within the past week he has started to do more. The other day I turned around to see him signing "sleepy." I asked him if he was ready for bed, but then I realized he was telling me his dinosaurs were sleepy, so he had tucked them into a blanket.
Matt has started to communicate a lot more, too. The last month his language capacity has increased dramatically, and he understands more and more every week. New words he says include two, three, go, balloon (or "boon"), owl (he says "oh"), book (which comes out as "tooka"), bug, catch, throw, cookie (which is more "ccccook" - he picked up this word very quickly!), and kick. He also says "oh oh" for monkey and "caw" for crow. Words with a "k" sound are especially appealing for him; "tickle" and "turkey" remain some of his favorite words. Where Matt's communication has really grown leaps and bounds, however, is in signing. He is learning signs as fast as I can learn them to teach them to him; he'll add a couple a day. In addition to the signs he knew before, including his favorite "more," he can now sign one and two; baby, Daddy, and Mommy; hungry, eat, and cracker; up; bath, wash hands, and swim; water, moon, star, tree, and sand; socks, shoes, shirt, pants, hat, and diaper; phone, book, ball, and robot; boat, car / drive, train, truck / bus, and we're working on plane; dog, fish, bird, pig, butterfly, frog, crab, mouse, spider, cat, turtle, elephant, tiger, bunny rabbit, dolphin, whale, and zebra; and love, want, and again.
Matt continues to love reading (we are making heavy use of our library card!), playing in sand, splashing in puddles, dumping things out and occasionally picking them back up, poking things with sticks, playing with balloons, anything to do with the moon, and most of all anything with animals, including sea creatures. He has also discovered kicking balls and hitting balls off tees this month, and he is working throwing and (thinking about catching) balls more.
Soccer lesson with Daddy
