Did you know that peanut butter can trigger heartburn? I never had heartburn before, and since I continue to slather sandwiches with
Wickles hot pepper relish (try it! It's delicious) and enjoy them with impunity, it didn't occur to me that something as innoccuous as peanut butter could cause pain. Garlic has become a minor issue too, but so far the heartburn is nothing a few generic Tums can't handle.
There was a time when I was pregnant with Charlotte that C tried to pursuade me to let us find out her gender before her birth day. I won (not that it was any sort of contest), and Charlotte's identity remained a mystery until we saw her face-to-face for the first time. This time, it looks like we'll be finding out early. I "let" C have his way and at next week's 19-week u/s, if the baby isn't excessively modest, we'll find out if Charlotte will have a baby sister or baby brother. C is trying to rationalize, emphasizing how much easier the transition to big sister will be for Charlotte if she knows the baby's name ahead of time. I think he has a point, but I also believe he just really wants to know.
In Charlotte news, her vocabulary continues to expand on a daily, almost hourly basis. At the grocery store last week, I let her hold the bag of onions (until she tried to take a bit out of one) and told her what they were. She rode around the store in the cart singing "un-un." Tonight, I shared some spaghetti with her and she called it "adetti." She calls out, "Simba (she says his full name now), warrooo?" when she can't find the cat ("where are you?"). She crawls underneath anything she can fit under, then peeks out and announces, "Under!" Each day, there's some different toy that she needs to "bring" everywhere she goes- "Bring book!" or "Bring duck!" When she really really wants something, she "NEEDs" it, spoken with a tinge of desperation... as if to say "why have you not handed this to me already?" She can say and correctly point to her eyes, nose, mouth, chin, cheeks, teeth, tongue, ears, eyebrows, neck, head, hair, back, arm, leg, sleeve, elbow, tushie, knee, foot, toe, ankle, and heel. Most surprisingly, she can count to 13! C and I usually get her started and prompt a number or two along the way, but once she reaches 5 she handles the rest completely on her own. The first time she did it, we couldn't believe our ears. I don't think she can identify actual numerals, but she knows that three is more than two. Just ask her how many cookies she'd like to eat.
Lemonade is still her favorite drink, and she can say it now without the extra syllables in the middle. Whenever she sees a ball, she tells me to kick it. We went to the library yesterday and she insisted we should find "bunny books!" so we came home with Peter Rabbit and a horrid book called Bunny Days (do you want to read about bunnies that get put in the washing machine, sucked into a vaccuum cleaner, and have their tails chopped off with garden shears?), as well as a couple of others. She loves to dance and spin when music is playing, and announce that she's dancing or spinning while she does it. We have a favorite song from a Sesame Street episode that we can listen and dance to again and again and again (What I am, performed by Will-i-am and the SS puppets- check it out. It's catchy and positive and exactly what I want my daughter to listen to). Soetimes she "needs" her "tu-tu" "on" while she dances. Her first 4-word sentence was, "Grandma read Elmo book." My parents babysit every afternoon while I work at my p/t, seasonal, low-paying but super-fun job, so she knows they're coming and makes plans for them.
My mind is a jumble now... I just realized I can't write a focused paragraph, so I'll end here and go to bed. Let's just say that 17 1/2 months is more fun than I imagined, and the fun increases every day.
