Growing a Little Schulze: 22 months!

I'm 22 months old?! Whoa!

22 months: Dec 24, 2012 - Jan 24, 2013

Claire just continues to develop at lightning speed! It's so fun to watch!

Some new and fun activities for her include:
-Building blocks - she suddenly developed a strong interest in building towers with her mega blocks (large legos)
-Trains - she's loving the train table we got her for Christmas. She likes to push the trains down the hill, but doesn't like the 3 train cars to be connected to each other. She wants them separated. She also likes to tell Jeff or I to sit by her (Mama sit sit! Dada sit sit!) and play with her. To aid in that, she likes to carry the little chairs from her table in the playroom out to the living room and pull them up to the train table.
- Mama read! - She's very into books and being read to and labeling all the items or actions that she has words for. For some reason she fell in love with the National Geographic magazine Jeff put in my stocking for Christmas. She'd bring it to me and tell me "Mama read!" She liked the pictures of animals and water but only stayed interested in the articles for a paragraph or so. :)
- She also loves songs and has requests when it's singing time in the bedtime routine. Round, round (or Wheels on the Bus) is her current favorite. One night she was holding a baby doll in her lap as she was sitting in my lap. As I sang to her, she made the dolls hands move to do the round round motion of the wheels of the bus and the motions of pat a cake. It was the first time I had seen her do that and it was so cute I had trouble continuing to sing!

Cognitively, she is making leaps with her shape and color knowledge. She can label a good number of both. For shapes she has square, circle, triangle, oval, heart, star, and diamond. She recognizes a rectangle as well. She also does a pretty mean shape sorter too. She's become much more confident in her colors. Blue, red, green, yellow, orange, pink, purple, brown, and white are pretty solid. She does mix up pink and purple and yellow and orange sometimes. It cracked me up one day when she asked for her "poo poo wa wa" and I finally realized she wanted her purple water cup!

It's been a fun month for language development. She has added the following to her vocabulary:
'mon (come on)
jamas (pajamas)
Care ub bup (Claire up up)
Dang mama. Dang dada (she heard Jeff say dang one day and decided to repeat it a few times :)
jaff (giraffe)
have/have it (Another way of asking for something. Have cracker? Have it?)
boke (broke/broken)
fix
tun tun (tunnel)

And....... my personal favorite:
Hooch!

What exactly is a hooch?

Well, it's a made up Claire word. Based on how she uses it, it's a verb that means to pick up something. Mostly her. She will tell me "Mama hooch!" and raise her little arms up to me, meaning she to be picked up. Jeff was trying to take her out to the car one day and she didn't want him to do it, she wanted me to do it, so she screamed "mama hooch! mama hooch!" Or in the morning when I get her from her crib, she'll gather up her sheep and blanket in her arms and ask me to "hooch" her and all her stuff. Or when she fell down the other day and ran to Jeff and said "hooch!" (Which was so cute that she went to him preferentially even though I was in the same room. It's rare that he gets that kind of treatment!) She's starting to expand it to other things, just the other day she picked up some bags and said "hooch bags" to let me know what she was doing.

We also had some fun outings this month. Jeff had a string of days off in early January, so we took a little trip out of town. We ran up to Chattanooga for an extended weekend. It was only about 1.5 hours away. Lots of kid friendly stuff for us to do, even in the chilly weather. We stayed at a Marriott Residence Inn downtown, right around the corner from the aquarium and the children's museum. So a great location plus it had a bedroom separate from the sitting area/full kitchen so we had a separate area to put Claire to bed plus a fridge for storing her milk and such. It worked out wonderfully.

The night we got there we walked around for a bit and crossed a long pedestrian bridge over the river to grab some food. The next day we headed to a real train ride and then went up to Lookout mountain. Claire LOVED the train ride. She talked about "choo choo, ride" for days. She also enjoyed running and climbing on the path through Rock City (Lookout Mountain). Sunday we finally visited the aquarium and also took advantage of free entry to the art museum (not Claire's favorite part!). Monday we visited the children's museum before heading home. Claire seemed to have a great weekend. Although she did get frustrated with us when we tried to make her hold our hand when crossing the street. Since she refused we had to carry her. And she was pretty ticked when we had the audacity to drive somewhere! She wanted to "walk walk" everywhere, all the time. Although she didn't really walk. She was usually too excited for that and did more of a prancing, tip toe type walk/run that was adorable!

And finally, continuing on the apparent choo choo theme, we went to the "Trains, Trains, Trains" model train exhibit at the local locomotive and civil war museum. They had really long track set up for multiple trains and various scenes in miniature that we enjoyed watching for a while. Then Claire played in the kids area and with the wooden train tables for a while before working on a craft. It was a bit of a madhouse with all the people but a fun morning out!