18 months!

My little ladies are morphing more and more each day from babies into little girls....
They had their 18 month check up this morning.
WOW.
18 months.
The last 6 months have literally flown by. They are growing SO fast! They already insist on feeding themselves at every meal and are incredibly independent, but soon they will be chatting in full sentences and playing pretend. AHHH!

Here are their 18 month stats:
Miss Olivia - AKA Baby A -
Weight - 29 lbs 8.5 oz (95th percentile)
Length - 34.5 inches (99th percentile)
Clothing size - 24 month
Diaper size - 5

Miss Brianna - AKA Baby B -
Weight - 30 lbs 1 oz (95th percentile)
Length - 34.5 inches (99th percentile)
Clothing size - 24 month
Diaper size - 5

They are a couple of healthy little girls! Our pediatrician said that 1 in 10 three year olds are the same size as our girls are now. HA! No wonder people are surprised when we tell them that they are 18 months old! And he is in no way concerned about their size. They look great, and they are proportional, so no worries. We were thinking maybe he would suggest changing from Vitamin D milk to 2% due to their size, but no. He wants them to stay on the Vitamin D milk until they are 2. Okey dokey then!

So what are our little peanuts up to now? 

Eating
We are PICKY! We love food, but only certain foods. Our favorite foods right now include yogurt, macaroni and cheese, spaghetti, peaches, bagels with cream cheese, Coco Puffs (mommy and daddy like Coco Puffs - the girls only get them as a snack occasionally), baked french fries (with ketchup!), and chocolate cake.
We are currently on strike with most vegetables, any meat that doesn't have some sort of sauce on it (such as BBQ sauce or cheese), and bread (strange, because they LOVED bread a month ago!).
We have transitioned to hard top sippy cups to reduce leaking, and the transition has gone well!


Sleeping
We are sleeping from about 9 PM - 7 AM at night. We are both in the same room now, in our cribs. It takes us a GOOD 30 minutes to fall asleep at night. We do a lot of flipping, flopping, and talking before we finally settle down.
Naps...oh naps...how the girls used to not fight you! So....the girls are still taking one nap in the afternoon. This used to be from about 12:30-3:30. Pretty consistent. Now it's more like, we put them down around 1...maybe they are asleep by 2, but maybe they aren't. About half of the time one of the girls has poo-d and we need to go in and change a diaper before she will go to sleep. The other half of the time the girls are just being defiant and are refusing to sleep! Over the last 5 days the girls have slept from approximately 2:30-4 PM. UGH. Hoping this is just a stage!


Discipline
We hate sharing. Hate it. But we are getting better at it. If one girl has two books and the other would like one, sometimes (about 30% of the time I'd say) the one with both books will give one to the other. We of course praise this like crazy! Most of the time though it turns into a hitting match. Hitting is one thing that is not well tolerated in our home and is a time out offense. The girls get frustrated when they don't get their way or when they can't get their point across, and their first response is often to hit the other person/pug/cat that happens to be close. Eek. We are working on it.
Time out for the girls consists of one minute in their crib, alone, with no one else in the room. When they are released from time out they are required to apologize and give a hug/kiss to the person/pug/cat they hit. It's working reasonably well...considering they are only 18 months old!


Vocabulary
The girls vocabulary is growing every day! Tonight Livvy just said "I love you" to Miss Jess before she left (ADORABLE), and this was the first time she clearly said it! Normal words in our vocabulary are: Mommy, Daddy, this, that, these, yes, no, thank you, hey/hi, yum, please, juice, out, hot, up, more...and a multitude of animal sounds (meow - cat, woof woof - dog, roar - bear, hoo hoo - owl, ooh ooh - monkey, moo moo - cow). That's all I can think of off the top of my head at 10:30 at night, although I am sure there are more! =)
They are trying more and more each day to communicate effectively with us. We are using a lot of signs. Our potty time DVD has helped a lot with that too. The girls now know "potty", "wash your hands", "wipe", "flush", "amazing", "drink", "eat", "water", and "body" all thanks to that one dvd! That adds onto the "milk", "more", "all done", "please", "thank you" and others that they already knew. Awesome! They still get very frustrated with us when we don't understand what they are saying, but it's a work in progress. For what it's worth, they almost always seem to understand each other! LOL!


Playtime
We are outside girls for sure! Our favorite things to do are often done outside and we will NEVER turn down an offer to go outside! While we are out we love to go see Aunt Denise's fish, play in the sandbox, go down the slide, go for walks and collect treasures (pine cones, sticks, rocks, etc.) along the way, sit in the grass and look at the trees, pick dandelions, touch the tops of the pretty flowers, and watch mom and Aunt Denise blow bubbles.

When we are inside, we LOVE books. LOVE. They love to read and be read to. They love to play with blocks, and play in the ball pit. They also love impromptu baths =). They think that making cookies is great fun, and they love any activity which allows them to stir =).

So that's the girls, the 18 month version! My little babies are growing up!  I love watching them learn and explore and grow, but I miss those baby stages too! So bittersweet!
I love you so much my little ladies!!!

Until next time -
Megan