Eighteen Months

Daisy's vocabulary is continuing to increase at a rate of knots. Some of the words she says follow the Eric Morecambe principle - all the right sounds, just not necessarily in the right order. For example, she says 'psoon' for 'spoon', 'padan' for 'panda', 'widden' for window etc. Her own name, apparently, is 'Deddiss'. I'm not too concerned right now; the fact that she has a vocab of approaching 200 words at 18 months means she'll probably learn to say these words properly at the same time as most kids are learning them for the first time. Having said that, she has some funny ways of saying things: 'teapot' is 'pot-tot'. which kind of follows the pattern I just mentioned, but 'slippers' are also 'pot-tots'. No idea where that one comes from. My personal favourite, which she just started saying recently, is 'menet' for 'rabbit'...

We've been working on numbers this month, although progress has been a bit 'one step forward, two steps back'. Earlier in the month if I put five objects in front of her and started with 'one', she would follow with 'two, sree, four, fize!'. Then she learned of the existence of seven and eight, and it all went downhill from there... Now when I say 'one' she goes straight to 'sezen, eight, ten!'

Other than in her speech, this month has been a fairly inauspicious one. She's turned into the world's pickiest eater, and as a result hasn't been getting enough to eat in the day so she regularly wakes up at night. Because I don't want to wake the neighbours, I have a fairly low threshold for giving her milk in the night which, having spoken to the health visitor on Tuesday, is probably contributing to the vicious circle, as formula is quite filling and she might not actually be hungry during the day, having filled up at night. So we're changing tack: switching to cow's milk instead of formula, no snacks during the day and if she doesn't eat her meals, she doesn't eat. If she wakes up in the night, I give her watered down milk which is diluted more and more each time until it's just water, by which point she will probably have realised that a) it's not worth waking up in the night just for water and b) if she's not going to get any 'food' in the night, she'd better eat during the day. That's the theory, anyway. The health visitor said she's not too young to be taught to eat properly this way, plus she's a good weight so has plenty of reserves to go a couple of weeks without eating much while she learns to eat what she's given.

On top of that, she's had the pox, of course, so I have made allowances for that. Her spots are healing nicely now, though, and she hardly knew she had it. She's still really clingy and won't try anything new (food or otherwise), which makes Tumble Tots on a Thursday a fairly fraught 45 minutes. I do hate to see her in tears each week but I honestly don't know if just sticking at it will help, or whether we should try a different activity on a Thursday.

But when she's not whining, crying, rejecting new foods without trying them or refusing to go on the slide, she's super cute :).