Eighteen months old today

It's hard to believe that our girl is a year and a half old today. It's a significant milestone to us - she's definitely turning into a little girl, and the baby we had is fading into memory. As if to emphasize that point, Claire began emphatically answering "no" (unprompted) to some of my questions today. We've been trying to get her to say no for a long time now (I know, we'll come to regret it), but she would only tease us with a soft-voiced "doh" while shaking her head back and forth. Today, she said with real conviction and clarity: "No". As icing on the cake, she gave a polite smile as she said it, as if she somehow knows that a smile softens a negative response.

Claire's verbal skills seem to be taking off again. For about a month, it seemed like she had forgotten most of her words and didn't want to repeat new ones. Now, she's going for it again. Her favourite words lately are "ice cream" (sounds like emya), "again", "dis" (this), "happy" (for what happened? and also for happy) and "colour" (sort of sounds like yellow). There are more, but I haven't been as good lately about jotting them down in my notebook to help me remember.

Claire went through a spell where she didn't have patience for her books, but she's back into them with full force now. She's even sitting now for slightly longer stories. She really loves stickers and colouring lately; as I write this, she is sitting on my lap drawing away and playing with some old address stickers for added fun.

One of my travel-mates blogged recently about her daughter's love for routines. At first, I didn't think Claire had noticed our routines but after my travel-mate mentioned it, I realized that Claire does do certain things as we go about our day together. Here are just a few that come to mind:

• when we prepare to leave the house, Claire points to the keys, says "dis", and then makes beeping sounds along with the house alarm;


• everytime we go past the spot where we keep her sunglasses, she says "dis" (see a pattern here?) and we then have to put them on and laugh while looking in the mirror;


• she often goes to put the safety gates in place before I even get the chance; and


• when we run her bath, she points to her tub toys up high and says "dis" until we put them in the tub.

Another thing Claire has been doing lately is trying to pre-empt activities she doesn't like by saying very fast: " all dee, all dee, all dee" (all done). She says it when we begin shampooing her hair, and she did it yesterday when I took her for blood tests (just follow-up HIV tests and others now that we've been home more than six months). Very clever attempt to convince me that the disagreeable task is done, I think.

That Claire is becoming a little girl was obvious last night as I tried a few fancy dresses on her that we received from friends and family as shower gifts. I hadn't tried them for some time and thought she may be close to fitting into them (not yet - maybe Spring). Anyway, with each new dress, she stood in front of the full-length mirror and admired herself: turned this way and that, twirled, smiled and practically curtsied to herself. Paul and I had a lot of fun watching her watch herself that we had to hold back laughter in case she thought we were laughing at her (which I guess we were but in a good way!).

I don't have many new pics to post - just one from yesterday with a Clinique bonus bag on her head as a lovely hat, and one from today outside our house on the way to the playground.