Bear is 18 Months old!

Our little guy is 18 months old now!  He is getting bigger and doing more every day.

Height: 33 1/2 in.

Weight: 30 lbs

Words: Ball, Bubble, Bath, "Soft", Help ("hep!"), Please, Cheese, Cup (actully this one comes out "bup"), bus, truck, book, baby, butt, kitty, doggy (or "doddy"), shoes, bah (meaning sippy cup), beebee (i think this means his blanket), Ewww, wow, and woah.

Favorite things:

• Playing outside with the big kids. Our front lawn has a tiny slope and he likes to run up and down it.
• Baths!  Approximately 600 times a day he runs to me and tugs at his clothes and says "Bath?" or "bubble?" in a hopeful voice. Or he runs into our bathroom and stands by the tub and asks for a bath.
• Chasing the kitties around the house.
• Walking to the bus. He gets antsy in the afternoon and grabs his shoes and stands by the door saying "bus?".  It takes us forever to walk around the block to the bus stop because he likes to stop and look at everything.  He gets really excited when he sees the bus coming down the street. He waves and waves to the driver.  Then we have to stand on the corner and wave and watch it turn and go out of sight before we can come home.  If he has a really, really lucky day, the UPS guy drives by while we are waiting.
• Looking for buses and trucks when we are driving around town. He can spot them anywhere and gets really happy and excited.
• Parroting every word and sound he hears. He will repeat a lot of the words we say perfectly without understanding the meaning. He also will parrot sounds- like when DMP sprayed some air freshner, he walked around going "Pshhhttt". When we picked up Luna, she cried in our carrier on the way home. He sat in the back seat singing softly "Meowww, Meeeeooow, Meooooowwwww".

Over Christmas we decided to get rid of his bottles and stop putting him down with a bottle/sippy to go to sleep at night. We were surprised that it didn't take very long (a week?) before he was used to the new routine (drink a sippy of milk and read a book before bed).  Now he goes down to both nap and bedtime without a fuss. Hurray!  

He is doing OK in nursery so far. He will play and let the teachers hold him, but he doesn't do well when they are transitioning from one activity to the next, and he really cries when we pick him up.  I've never had a kid who has had a hard time with nursery so this is new for all of us! We're optimistic that he'll get used to it and be OK eventually...