Martha at 18 months

As Martha fans have already noted, the frequency of blogging has been adjusted, so there was no month 17, and I suspect no month 19 either, but never fear, there is much to report.

The major changes over the last two months have been in both of our situations, as we are both now at work full time. So there is now in place a really quite elaborate and impossible to remember schedule of day care for Martha, involving several different houses, different times each day and even different languages. Naturally Carrie can remember much more than I, but today even she knocked on the wrong house to come and get her. There are other children for her to play with and while she's not exactly playing with them she does smile at them, give them things and take things away from them. She also seems to learn quite a lot from the slightly older ones, just by watching.

Since she started with this arrangement she has really picked up a lot of words, and can even say some of them properly. She still has her own versions of perhaps 20 words, but can say "horse", "mama", "dada", "baby", "Jordy"(next door baby) and even "agua", pretty well and I suspect that the average passerby would be able to recognise them, particularly if there was a horse standing next to her. And she does fair number of animal noises too, including those of dog, cat, elephant, horse, fly and fish (well, thats more of an expression). I have no idea how many words she can understand now, but its getting on a hundred I reckon and could be way more than that for all I know.

We still haven't cut her hair, because as it's getting longer it's curling up and not progressing any closer to the floor. I'm quite pleased about this as I reckon it would be hard work to take a pair of scissors to the head of a squirming child, and it doesn't look like it will need it for several more months either. When wet, the back of it comes down level with her armpits! I was blond as a child until I was about 5 apparently.

I went swimming with her too! First was at a friend's house who just happened to have a pool. She was not too happy about that, maybe because it wasn't too warm in the water. Then I went to the Berkeley High School's "Warm Pool". It's just what it says - a pool that is warm. Almost hot in fact, kept like that for people who like it warm, like people with muscle problems. And babies. She seemed to love it and after a bit of watching the other kids was splashing around most happily and even jumping in.

The above item is the SnackTrap, a nifty invention for keeping pieces of food off the floor. Here it contains Cheerios, and the user (left) can delve in and pick out a few when needed while the thing is at any angle. For some reason many people are very interested in this apparatus and always ask about. Martha has discovered the way to remove the top now, so perhaps its usefulness is numbered. SnackTrap also make the CrumbChum by the way.