19 Months

I’ve gotten so use to saying “18 months” when someone asked how old Emry is, it’s a bit surprising even to me that she is actually 19 months now. I know, that’s not a big difference (although it might be when you’re as young as she is), but it makes me realize that soon I won’t be counting her age in months anymore – all too soon I will be counting years.

18 months has been a huge time of growing and learning new things for our little girl. Not in size so much for we still wear 12-month clothes but in every other way. She walks about quite well now. Honestly, it doesn’t mean she gets into anything more than she did crawling and pulling up – it simply means her things are scattered about in every room of the house. Thankfully, she’s good about putting them away when I tell her it’s time to. She even knows where they all go.

That’s fun to. Her vocabulary has grown considerably. While she doesn’t string more than two or maybe three words together, she can communicate better. (Not perfectly, of course, as we work a lot on the asking for something versus whimpering for it.) And she understands us. I can tell her to go to a particular room and she knows where to go. I can tell her to fetch me something and she knows what to bring. She’s relating things to one another in her little world. She’s sees a picture in her books and points to the things she owns that are the same. One book reminds her of another on her shelf she pulls out to read. When we say it’s time to go to church, she says, “Silas!” (A little boy in her class.) And when I pull out the hymnal to sing, she immediately begins her rendition of “Holy, Holy, Holy”. (Which is pronounced “’Oly, ‘Oly, ‘Oly”.)

Of course the biggest thing is realizing that she is watching. Always watching. I was in the kitchen the other day, and in she comes with her thermometer in her hand, holding it to her ear like a phone and jabbering away to whomever was on the other end. She loves to talk on her “phone”, walking all around as she does so. “Just like you,” Ed told me. “You do know you walk all over this house when you’re on the phone.” Yes, I know…

She also covers up her stuffed animals with her blankets, takes them to the potty (we’ve just started the potty training process, slowly until we get back from Thanksgiving) and hugs and kisses them. She carries her little ball bag around on her arm, as frustrated at it as I am at my bag because it never stays up on my shoulder.

But today she did something I expected would come about in time. I had left my phone on my chair, so she grabbed it this morning while I was in the bathroom putting my contacts in. When she brought it into the bathroom, holding it up to me (which usually means she needs help finding the pictures of herself), I realized it was talking. Since it sounded like two people talking, I thought she had somehow gotten into one of the music apps and turned on some radio broadcast. (She has turned on the music before.) The problem was, she had tried once too often to put my passcode in (which she doesn’t know – she just hits numbers), so I was locked out for a minute. I decided just to put the phone aside when I heard a, “Hello? Hello? Melissa?” I picked it up. “Hello?” I wondered who in the world I was talking to. It was my Aunt Lynn. And I wasn’t just talking to her – I was facetiming her. Because I couldn’t get into my phone I couldn’t see her, but she could see me (in all my radiant I haven’t brushed my hair or gotten out of my pajamas splendor). And because Emry had somehow Facetimed Lynn, Lynn couldn’t hang up…and I was locked out of my phone. So, we chatted for a few minutes until I could get back into my phone and say good-bye. And we all had a good laugh…but how Emry did that, well, I simply don’t know.