17 Months Old!

Over the past few weeks Oliver has been increasing how many steps he will take at a time. He started with 2-3 steps, then increased to 5 steps, and more recently started taking more than 5 steps at a time. He'd revert to crawling if he fell down when walking. I declared him to be officially walking when he started getting back up and walking after he fell down. He still crawls some. He hasn't totally switched to walking yet, but the tide is turning in that direction! I am glad I didn't accept the referral for physical therapy two months ago. I took these videos at my parents' house on Paul's birthday.

Over the past month he also got one more molar, which means he currently has six teeth. We're also starting to really work with him on responding to the word "no." In particular we're working on NOT opening the trash can in the kitchen. He learned how to open it and likes to remove the contents. Lovely. He lost about half a pound over the past month. I imagine he lost the weight over the past week between being sick and not being allowed to eat in preparation for the surgery that didn't take place yesterday.

He keeps adding a new word here and there to his vocabulary. Two of the newest ones are "cat" (it surprised us that he said cat rather than kitty in reference to my mom's geriatric cat) and "that" (not pronounced 100% correctly but it's obvious he is trying to say the word "that"). Hands down the word he says the most often is "mama." I heard it an awful lot yesterday in the car on the way to the hospital and back. He probably was thinking "mama, why won't you feed me?" and "mama, why are you making me sit in this car seat for 7 hours?".

Already had one sock off and was working on taking the second off!

He has now reached the stage of enjoying putting objects into containers. This means he has begun to help some with cleaning! Of course he does FAR more destroying than picking things up. His favorite toys from Christmas would include the sock monkey car that Great Gram gave Ian (which happens to be by far my least favorite toy that they received as the song it plays is loud and annoying), the color fish toy that Aunt Wendy gave him, and the race track that my parents gave Ian. I wish I had a video of him watching the cars race. He could not be more excited!

Now we need to get the boy healthy so he can have his surgery rescheduled as I'd really like to potty train him in August, if possible, but he can't be potty trained until the repair surgery or surgeries are completed.

They measured his height and weight at CHOP yesterday while he was standing up (far more accurate height measurement than how they do it at the Peds), but I didn't see the results. Bummer.

Ian's funny facial expression is due to the fact that I snapped this photo in the middle of him giving Oliver a kiss!