In honor of Clare’s bookwormy-ness, and to try to preserve some memories in my online baby book, here are some of the books we read over and over and over again (and again and again).

This is a recent favorite that is known as “Zeeb-a book” (Zebra book) It’s a pretty simple, repetitive book and Clare can just about recite it. She also loves to turn each page and say “night night pig” “night night zeeb-a” “night night (hedge) hog” to each of the animals.

I love Eric Carle – and Clare does too. We just got this book and it’s a new favorite. Her favorite part is there is a little squeaker noise maker at the end of the book.

Another Eric Carle! This book has been a favorite for a while. I think that Mom actually hid this book in Hawaii because she was so tired of reading it.

We don’t actually own this book (yet) but it’s Clare favorite book at nannyshare. Adam reports that she requests it every time they sit down to read. I think he’s getting a little tired of it.

Lastly, this is my favorite book. It’s a take-off on the Hush Little Baby nursery rhyme but instead of buying things, Momma shows the baby shooting stars, humming birds, teddy bears and warm blankets. It’s become my favorite lulla-bye to sing before bed.

We had Clare’s 18-month check up last week. Kiddo weighed in at 23 lbs. and 33.2 inches tall. For comparison, at her 12 month appointment Clare was 30.1 inches tall. She grew 3 inches in six months. Holy moly! No wonder she’s been eating and sleeping so well. The girl is growing! That would also explain why her 18 month clothes only fit for about a week and a half. As has been her pattern, Clare is in the 40% for weight and the 85% for height. She’s a long lean little bean.

I would say that Clare is adding a new word a day, but it’s probably more than that. She now points out the “bus… vroom vroom,” said that something was “loud” the other day, points out the “planes” that fly overhead (which is often since we are below the path of life flight helicopters), tells Sadie to “Sit! Stay!” and many others. She also combines words into short statements like “Where go?” “Where Sadie (or Daddy, or G, or Monkey) at?” “Read book” and “Daddy (or Mama, or G) sleeping.” Interestingly, J was gone for a business trip for a few days and the whole time Clare kept saying “Daddy sleeping.” Today in the car I got frustrated with another driver and said “Geez dude! Go go go go go!! You’re pissing me off!” From the back seat I hear a little voice saying “Go go go go go!” She kept it up for several blocks, but I was glad that she had chosen that part of the statement to hold onto. It’s a good reminder that I need to watch my language…

After the “sassy pants” episode of last week, this week has been really fun in the Mac House. Clare is back to being her usual delightful self and amazes us with her development and view on the world. Truly, she’s just a lot of fun. She’s starting to play little games, participate in activities that require a (brief) attention span, and communicate more every day.

Clare’ s started to show an interest in stacking blocks – not just knocking down the blocks that I stack. She worked on these blocks for about 20 minutes, very seriously the whole time. It’s fun to watch her understand spatial relationships and also develop the fine motor skills to explore them.

She’s still our little bookworm, and I found her reading a book the other day while sitting on her “bike.” It didn’t look very comfortable to me…

More coloring! At least once every day Clare asks to “cah-worr.” Mostly she likes to play with the different crayons rather than creating a picture. She’s pretty good at identifying the colors yellow and black. She selects a crayon, draws a line with it, asks what color it is (or declares that it’s a color), and then puts the crayon back and gets another one.

We’re also seeing more and more imagination role playing. The picture above is of Clare putting her beloved monkey to sleep. She covered him with her blanky, patted him and whispered “night night.” I almost spontaneously combusted from the cuteness. She cuddles her “babies,” pushes them in the shopping cart, puts them in the high chair, and this morning I saw her trying to put a diaper on her elephant. She also had me give her monkey a horsie ride the other day.

Oh this little girl! It’s a good thing she’s so cute. There are lots of kisses, hugs and snuggles in our house these days. Yesterday Clare had me give her baby doll a kiss good-bye as I was leaving. One kiss for Clare (OK, maybe two) and a kiss for baby. Monkey, bear, her dolls and other beloved animals are hugged and cuddled. Her new Wocket is read to, dolls are spoon fed and Baby Elephant is never far from Mama Elephant. The stuffed animals in our house are very well loved and cared for. Her mother and father, on the other hand, can’t always say we receive such caring treatment. Clare has been, ummm, testing these days. As in she is testing whether or not she can gets what she wants by whining instead of using her words. I’ve shaken my head many times in the last week going “Really? You’ve been saying ‘pwees’ and ‘more’ and ‘all done’ for months but now you’d rather throw yourself on the ground and wail rather than do it? Really?” This same internal conversation has included topics like eating dinner, putting on her shoes, wanting to be held while we’re cooking, and any other issue that we might say “no” to. Deep breath Mama – this too shall pass.

But, as always, with the salt comes plenty of sugar. Clare has started singing quite a bit these days. We can ask her to sing us a song and we usually get a “la la la” mixed with other song-like syllables. I was singing the ABCs to her today and she chimed in at “TUV” and kept up the rest of the song! She even did the whole “sing with me.” I was impressed. She also does the hand motions for Itsy Bitsy Spider. Now that we can understand some of what she’s saying I’ve started to notice some conversation trends. We talk about Grandma and Grandpa, Mama and Daddy a lot, but more often we talk about Sadie and Buddy (the dogs), or kitties or airplanes. She also imitated our “I love you” today. OK, it sounded like “iluwee” but J and I needed it after the evening we had.