17 Months

This update turned out much longer than I had planned (they always do).  If reading the details of Jesse's life bores you, please just skip it.  This is an easy way for me to keep some kind of record of what Jesse is doing each month (and satisfy the Grandparents' Jesse fix).  Sadly I don't have any pictures to go along with this post.  I went through Jesse's pictures from the past month and I have already posted everything.

• Loves his books.  He is constantly bringing us books to read, and in the past month or two, he has taken a liking to sitting in my lap while I read to him.  I also realized a couple months back that he has come up with names for most of his books.  For instance, he calls Goodnight Moon "moon" and I Love You Through and Through "through", and A Night Night Prayer he calls "shhhh", because every page begins with "shhhh...".  When he brings me the book Birthday Monsters he always goes to the coffee table and knocks on it with his fist, because the birthday monsters knock on the door on the first page of that book.  I like to call him my little librarian.
• We realized recently that Jesse knows at least the last word of each line in his favorite songs.  I would sing a line from a song but leave off the last word and he got them without fail.  He thinks it's a really fun game.
• Jesse seems to like food more and more as time goes on.  I remember thinking he would never like solid foods, but now he devours them.  We are amazed by how much he can put away and what types of things he will try.
• He has become my little helper around the house.  He loves to go get the broom from the closet and "sweep" the floors.  He also loves to put trash in the trash can.  Sometimes, though, I find blocks and other non-trash items in there.
• As of Sunday Jesse is completely weaned.  I feel like it should have felt bittersweet, but I never really got emotional about it (maybe that will come later?).  I was holding off on dropping his bedtime feeding until after the camping trip, because I had tried to drop that one previously and he was not ok with it.  He basically went berserk both times that I had tried that, and so I didn't want a huge bedtime battle on our camping trip.  When we were back home Sunday night, I offered to nurse him and he wasn't very interested at all, so I just went with it, and he fell asleep with no problem.  I am thankful that it didn't have to be a struggle and that it happened naturally.
• I feel like Jesse acquired more of a taste for cow's milk once I dropped him down to only nursing once/day, but it could just be a coincidence.  He now asks for his "mulk" all the time.  I would still like him to drink a little more of it, but he's getting plenty of cheese and yogurt, so I'm not really concerned.
• We wrote up all of Jesse's words the other night, and came up with somewhere between 150-200 (depends on whether or not you count letters and numbers and animal sounds as words).  He constantly runs his mouth.  His latest "word" is "thank you" in Chinese, which he picked up from one of his favorite buddies here in our building.  I'm not sure that he really knows what it means, but it was funny because he kept saying it tonight at dinner, both randomly and when we would give him more food.
• Lots of his words are not pronounced correctly, and many of them are just first syllables of the actual word, but he is getting better at putting the final sounds and syllables on words.  For instance, he loves saying any word that ends in the 'k' sound, like truck and milk and chalk.  What he REALLY loves to say (meaning 100 times per day) is stuck, but he pronounces the 'st' as 'f'.  This is quite embarrassing when we are in public and he is screaming this word (angrily, mind you, because wouldn't you be frustrated if you were stuck?).  You can only imagine all the places where he screams this word: from the shopping cart, the stroller, the swings at the playground, the high chair at restaurants, and the list goes on.
• He is very sociable and has learned the names of the buddies he sees most often.  Alyse is "yaya" (not sure exactly how that name came about), Sid is "sih", and Nathan is "Nate".  He really loves his buddy Nathan right now and is always saying his name and looking for him in the tot lot and on the playground.  He also loves saying hi to anyone and everyone.  Today he was up on the playground equipment yelling hi to all the people walking down the street.  I seriously don't know where he gets this from.
• He finally seems to be doing really well with one nap per day.  It felt like he was kind of in limbo for a long time, needing two naps lots of days, but other days he would only take one.  He now goes down for his nap around 11:30 and wakes up between 1:30 and 2:00.  He is much more able to go down a little later for his nap if need be, and is in much better spirits in the evenings before bedtime than he was a month ago with only one nap.
• Loves getting to walk places rather than being carried.  He perks up when he finds out he is going to get to walk to the playground or tot lot or the parking lot and he really likes pushing the elevator buttons.