18 Months

Well, Raiah isn't a baby any more, that's for sure. She's a full blown toddler complete with tantrums, emotional turbulence, lots and lots to say and very very little patience. She basically repeats everything we say but her daily vocabulary has grown exponentially, which is awesome! She seems to know exactly what she's NOT supposed to do. She'll do it while yelling "NONONONO" (I  know a lot of kids do this and it's hilarious!). she knows some shapes and colors but only says "circle" and "purple", the rest she'll just point to. she knows most animals by name and the sounds of some (like every time I tell her to eat her chicken, she goes "bagh bagh bagh??" she knows cows say "moo" and sheep say "baa" and dogs say "woof woof"). she has also started feeding herself a lot more lately, to the point that she won't eat unless she's feeding herself. 

she somehow always knows exactly where we're heading. she'll call out "granpa!" before i even turn into their street and claps and yells "HOME!!!" when i pull into the Target parking lot :) she can also count 1 to 5 in farsi and knows all of her books by name or subject. I try to read some of her books in farsi but she always wants me to start over in english. I'll get to page 3 and she yanks the book away, goes back to page one and says "doreh? doreh?" (dobareh is farsi for "again") until I start reading in english and then she'll let me finish the book. ha!

her vocabulary at 18 months:

monkey dumpy dumpy ("no more monkeys jumping on the bed")

taab (farsi for swing)

park

show

moobie (movie)

hockey
all done

window

table

chair

tree (means tree or broccoli)

gol (farsi for flower)

hair/nose/toes/eyes/ear/teeth/knees

bubbles

colololo (color)

book

cat

ake (snake)

lion

zeba (zebra)

milk

cup

dance

blanket

baby

shoes

socks

pants

diaper

"thank you" and "mersi"

sheep

fish

dog

duck
bear

target

cracker

apple/bewi (blueberry)/nana (banana)

puzzi (puzzle)

ball/boom=baloon

hot

bath

farm

tractor

plus all of our names.

and I'm sure I'm forgetting about 25 more words. and she talks constantly. it never stops. even in her sleep. sometimes it's a string of all the words listed above or just gibberish but the girl LOVES to hear her own voice.

Life's a beach

We took Raiah to the beach yesterday. Scott and I had a day off together (which is very rare!) and even though the forecast was rain, we went anyway. We're definitely NOT beach people but we've been trying to take Raiah as often as possible since we live close by. This was the first time she seemed to enjoy herself, however. She had a permanent smile on her face and took a good four hour nap after. 

She's nearing 16 months and is basically the best baby in the world. She has started talking a little and I feel like she's not going to stop.... her words at 15.5 months are: mama, dada, nana, papa, bah bah (food), up, down, dog, duck, ee i ee i o, hi, baby, baa (bath), apple, tachee (taji) and oah (noah). Her newest thing is when we ask her to say something, she'll whisper the opposite. Like we'll say "say nana! can you say nana?" and she'll walk away whispering "papa" or we'll say "can you say daddy?" and she'll whisper "mama" and look for our reaction. it's pretty funny. 

Resolutions

The older I get, the more I like that my birthday is so close to new years. Making resolutions makes more sense this way. And there are quite a few things I want to try to keep up with this year. I'm actually pretty good at keeping new years/birthday resolutions. For example, last year my goal was to take more pictures and document our lives better. I took over 2000 pictures with my phone and another 700 with my camera plus about 100 videos. It helps that I had such a great little model to take pictures of :) Anyway, these are my goals for 2013:

1. Look up from my phone a lot more often. Be present. Leave my phone in my purse so I'm not tempted to keep browsing. This will be hard, but not impossible.

2. Plan an activity for every week. We work a lot of hours and barely ever see each other but we have some mornings together, just enough time to have some family time. I want Raiah to experience new things all the time and be well versed in the world. So every week we'll do something fun. Like this week we went to a petting zoo. (yes, even though I hate animals...) I think this will get easier when she's better at walking because, it's hard to keep her in a stroller :). Also when she's a more stable walking toddler, I want to do more service oriented things. I remember my mom doing things for our neighborhood all the time when I was little and I did a lot of service in high school. I don't want to be too busy for that.

3. Take care of my skin. Wash my makeup off every night. Keep up with a skin care regiment because let's face it, all the fun-in-the-sun times are starting to show on my poor face.

4. Say YES before talking myself out of things. Just say YES more often. To everything.

5. Not feel guilty. This is a big one for me. I think a lot of working moms feel this way in the age of excessive social networking and pinterest when everyone else's craftiness, cooking and creative parenting is shoved in everyone else's faces. If I don't have time to repurpose furniture or grow our own food or sew little dresses out of pillow cases, that's ok. The truth is, even with my limited time, I do a lot of creative things that make my heart happy. Planting an edible garden is NOT one of those things and I'm going to be ok with that. When it counts, I do enough "homemade" and I do it whole heartedly.

6. Drink less coffee, more tea, NO soda. Less coffee will be hard but no soda will be super easy because we don't drink soda at home anyway and it'll be easy not to order it at restaurants.

7. Not dwell on things (or people's behavior) that are out of my control. This is my resolution every year... and I fail miserably every year.

8. Speak and read more in Farsi to Raiah. I always forget to talk to her in Farsi. She's going to be bilingual. I'll have to make sure of that :)

9. Use the china, the fancy soap, the expensive towels/sheets, etc. Who the heck am I saving them for exactly?! Why not enjoy them ourselves!?!

10. Speak kindly about others and be less judgmental. (another resolution I fail to keep every year....)

and here's Raiah dancing.