Kamy – 20 Month Update

Once more, I’m playing catchup on blog posts.  At least I know I still need to do them, right?!?  Better late than never, since otherwise I know I’ll never remember when she started doing things.  I’ve been so busy with Caden the last several weeks that finding 20 minutes to write a post (and type with both hands!) is in short supply.

• Kamy’s officially added 11, 12, and 13 to her counting.  Since she’s mostly saying one syllable words right now, 13 – 19 are all “teen,” and we’ve lost the connection between an item and just saying the word.  Lol!  Until we consistently add a second syllable, I expect we’ll be stuck at “teen” for a while.  =)

• McKamy has all her upper case letters down pat.  She’s also realized that letters are all around her.  When we were in Longview  a few weeks ago, she was spelling Kohls and Target while waiting with Daddy in the car.  She’s also noticing billboards and road signs.  What a smart girl!  For the most part she’ll name the letters in order from left to right, which is a great start.  She’s also realized that there are letters in all the books that we read and often she will point out and name letters on a page as we’re reading.  I’m excited to see her enthusiasm grow as she learns the power of letters (and thus words)!

• We’ve started working on learning our lower case letters.  She’s making great progress, but we’re struggling with noticing the differences in the “tails” on different letters — p and d, n and h, and i and j are pretty similar.  Admittedly that’s a hard concept to grasp.

• Kamy’s finally figured out colors!  Between a new puzzle and cards from Grandmindy and tons of repetition with all her other toys, it’s clicking.  She knows pink, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, brown, black, gray, and white.  Now we describe the colors of almost everything we see.

• Shapes are coming along nicely too.  She can name and identify — circle, square, rectangle, star, diamond, and oval.

• In the world of books, Kamy’s found a new level of interest in the “Look and Find” books.  She’s had several of them for a long time, but she hadn’t really put together the concept of matching images.  Grandmindy gave her a series of these books though, and she finally figured it out.  Some of the matching images are pretty hard too, especially when they’re partially hidden or they’re drastically smaller than the pictures in the key.  (Unfortunately) she memorizes where everything is pretty quickly, so the actual novelty of the pictures wears off, but we just change what we’re searching for!  Now it’s just a game of “find the ___.”

• A few weeks ago, both Daddy and I were startled to hear “THUD,” promptly followed by Kamy crying.  We knew immediately what happened — a certain little girl had managed to climb out of her crib!  She wasn’t hurt, but it did surprise and scare her a little bit.  I wasn’t expecting this to happen quite so early, but here we are.  A few days later I heard her cry change tones during her morning nap.  When I went in there, I found the same certain little girl in her crib but with her leg stuck between the crib bars.  Needless to say, she wasn’t pleased.  After detangling her, all was fine.  She hasn’t tried to climb out again since!  Unfortunately the crib manufacturer doesn’t sell the toddler crib rail individually any more, so I’ve ordered a generic rail so we can convert her crib.  We haven’t converted it yet, but I imagine it’s on the horizon.

• Another new skill is undressing herself.  Most mornings she has managed to remove at least a part of her jammies.  It’s always a surprise to see what she is (or is not) wearing!  This also means we’ll periodically find her missing pants or a shirt during the day.  We’re mostly ignoring it and hoping it will go away on it’s own, but I know most kids go through a “naked” phase.

Those are the major milestones that Kamy hit in the last month.  It’s so much fun to see her learning each day.  She keeps me on my toes and I’m constantly trying to find new creative ways to teach her about our world.  It’s a full time job!