I was just looking back on the post I wrote about Elisabeth at 14 months old and marveling at how much changes in three months!

The headlines are: still not walking, range of food she’ll eat hasn’t changed, vocabulary is up to about 125 words, sleep is still variable and she has lots more teeth.

At fifteen months old, Elisabeth finally mastered crawling, but she’s still not walking on her own. In the last couple of weeks she’s begun to take 3-4 steps between furniture without holding on to anything, but it seems that’s mostly when she’s caught up in what she’s doing and not thinking about the fact that she’s not hanging on. If I encourage her to take a couple of steps to me without anything between us to hold on to, she won’t do it. She gets down and crawls over instead. She’s gotten pretty good at climbing up the stairs but usually wants to be holding a hand when she does that too. In general she’s a pretty timid kid when it comes to anything physical. Her nursery teacher encouraged me to do more messy play with Elisabeth at home because apparently she’s fairly “squeamish”, according to the teacher.

She’s certainly not timid when it comes to being social or talking. She still gets loads of attention from strangers when we’re out and I think it’s because she watches people intently with those big blue eyes. She’s very curious about people, and she especially loves other kids. (“Kid!” she exclaims exuberantly when she’s sees a small person.) We go to the park most days that she doesn’t go to nursery, and it’s so she can be around other kids as much as the physical exercise and getting out the house aspect of it. There are a group of girls at our church who are around 7-12 years old who absolutely adore Elisabeth. As soon as the service is over they come over and take her off to play leaving James and I to have our post-service coffee/tea and conversation in peace. Elisabeth loves it too. It’s reason enough to get up and go to church on Sunday morning!

Elisabeth’s vocabulary is up to about 125 words and she still chatters away most the time, even sometimes when she’s in her pushchair. We’re trying to teach her good manners, and she’s picked up “thank-you” very well (“Kank-yooo!”), saying it unprompted most of the time when we give her something or do something for her — and sometimes when she gives us something if we don’t say it fast enough. “Please” still usually requires prompting (“How do you ask nicely?”), although occasionally when she’s really wanted something, she’s repeated “Please! Please! Please!” over and over. She knows lots of names of relatives and kids she goes to nursery with. Other than “Kank-yooo”, I think my favourite word that she says is “hello” because she sticks her tongue way out of her mouth to make the “L” sound. It’s rather adorable!

Sleep has really been up and down the last few months, and I think much of that is connected with teething. Elisabeth has popped out another 7-8+ teeth in the last three months (it’s a little hard to get a good look to see just how many there are now) and it seems like she’s been teething at least half of that time. We can tell when she’s teething because she gets a lot more clingy (especially to me – often she won’t even want to go to James and cries when I hand her over), she eats even less than usual, her poo gets really squishy, and she wakes up more at night needing attention. Recently she’s been waking before 6 am and will sometimes go back to sleep, but only if she’s on me, which means I don’t go back to sleep. Thankfully the last few mornings have been back to normal – waking up between 6:30 and 7:00.

Over the last month she’s been switching from morning to afternoon naps which completely reorganises our days. On days that she naps at home, she’ll usually go down for a nap sometime between 12:00 and 2:00 and will sleep for 2-3 hours. Naps at nursery rarely last more than an hour and there have been a few days recently when she’s been at nursery all day and not napped at all.

A fun new development is that just in the past week Elisabeth has started getting into taking care of her “babies”. I’ve gotten her some secondhand dolls and doll furniture on Ebay, and she can get awfully absorbed in wrapping the dolls up in blankets, putting them in and out of the cradle, taking the blankets off them, pushing them in the doll buggy, giving them drinks from her sippy cup, etc. It’s very sweet.

Elisabeth loves music and will “dance” to almost anything, including sounds that apparently sound musical to her – like the hair dryer and the car alarm sound on her play keys. She sings to herself a lot. The main thing that she sings is “Bye-bye, Dada. Bye-bye, Dada. Bye-bye Dada. [mumble mumble mumble]” This is a song that we often sing at baby & toddler singing sessions at local children’s centres to start and end the sessions. The tune is perhaps best known as “Goodnight, Ladies” from The Music Man. Elisabeth started singing this at around 16 months old and it took me a little while to figure out what she was singing. The thing I find most remarkable is she had worked out that the “Bye-bye, Dada” bit is repeated three times and then the fourth line is different. She has since added, “Hello, Dada”, “Hello, baby”, and other variations. She has in the past couple of days added a new song to her repertoire as well: “Ee-oh. Cuck. Quack, quack.”. (That would be, Old Mac Donald – with a duck.)

Favourite things: her babies, the park (“Pahk!”), Lego (“Geggo!”), nursery, music & singing, crackers, and of course, her dummies.