fifteen months

The month, like so many others in our recent past, was overtaken mostly by teething. He cut two molars and an eye tooth with a double ear infection chaser. I can't complain a lot because it was our first ever ear infection in this house and all I can say is that you people that deal with ear infections every few weeks are my HERO. I've never seen either of our kids quite as cranky as Cameron was for a few days there. 

He bounced back though and now he's back to steering me around by throwing his body this way or that way when I'm carrying him around. He is obsessed with the counters and the drawers and I can't do ANYTHING without him flipping out because it's his turn! It's his turn with the potato masher already. 

He's trying to figure out how the world works and I remember now why I think 15 months might be my favorite age of all-time. He is just so curious about everything. All he wants in life is to figure out how to open the lotion lid by himself. Can you imagine life being that simple? He runs over and hands me things willing me to open them with his eyes because he hasn't quite figured out how to get the word OPEN to come out of his mouth. He can say it with his eyes though and when I say "Open?" and hand it back to him he looks so proud of himself.
 
Top the curiously off with the new words that are flying out of his mouth left and right and not an hour goes by that I'm not amazed by his brilliance. Ski, he just pointed at my eyes and said EYES! Can't you believe it? We gave birth to the second coming of Einstein for sure! He says maw (more), eyes, up, aa duu (All Done), naaa (nose), ni ni (night, night), light, uh oh and my personal favorite, Mama. He's figured out how to use the fact that it's my favorite word to his advantage.

He's a picky little eater but loves grapes, pizza, hot dogs, milk and grilled ham and cheese sandwiches. Yep, I think that pretty much covers it. He claps his chubby little hands when I put grilled ham and cheese sandwiches on his plate and then promptly devours the entire sandwich himself in about seven seconds.
 
When those seven seconds are up, he demands that we remove him from the confines of his booster seat because there is climbing to do. If he's not demanding that I carry him around to show him the various things that are just out of reach for him, he's scaling the walls. Or standing at the basement door and screeching until we take him downstairs. 

He's likes to snuggle between the minutes of 7:24PM and 7:42PM and that's it. He curls right up with his blankets on my lap, finds a corner EXACTLY like his sister used to do, puts his bottle off to the side of his mouth and chugs. I don't know if all kids do these things or if he learned them from watching her but I do know that he does it precisely like she does. It makes me smile. 

He plasters his head against the shoulder of whomever picks him up and it is just about the cutest thing I have ever seen in my life. When new people are around, he puts his head on my shoulder like he's shy and then keeps looking back and smiling. When he's nervous in general, he plasters that head to whatever shoulder is close. He prefers man shoulders but is starting to come around on the ladies.
 
He's been so great with sleeping lately that I hate to jinx it so I'll just say that I've finally gotten to the point where the sun going down doesn't make me want to cry. When I hear him stirring through the monitor in the morning I can't wait to get in there to see what he's up to, to find out how much he's grown overnight. That feeling, the I-missed-you-while-you-slept feeling has not been part of my relationship with Cameron until this point. It hasn't been part of our relationship because I saw him every two hours all night long for the first 13 months of his life. It is a nice (and very welcomed) change. I can promise you that the Baby Whisper's Pick Up, Put Down thing works...at least on older babies. We went through like 4-5 nights of sheer hell where we picked him up and put him down no fewer than 1,000 times but he eventually figured it out and I'm so glad that I didn't end up getting to the point where I had to make him cry so hard he puked.

We took him swimming over the weekend and he LOVED it. He loved flirting with the girls in the pool and playing with the toys. He dumped those buckets of water over and over again. It is so fun to watch him develop, to watch his little personality grow into something so astonishingly different than his big sister. They are polar opposites, my children, and I'm so thankful for that. I'm so thankful for my outgoing little boy with the big eyes and the even bigger laugh. I'm so thankful that he brought his own challenges and his own success stories when he came into my life because he has made me appreciate even more the prevelance of indivivuality. He made me realize that every single child on earth is completely different and I find myself a lot more forgiving of other people in general. I've changed so much because of one little feisty baby boy that since day one has gone up against everything I had planned for him and proved to me that I have very limited control over the course that life takes me.

And, as a side, I'm SO GLAD that I took the time to do these monthly posts because the other day I went and read Renee's 15 month post. And I was all like, HOLY CRAP I totally remember her as an angel at this age and my own writing says not. CRAZY.

Comments

[AmandaH]

He's sweet! I love his little blue jeans. Very stylish.
Is his hair stick straight or does it have wave to it in the back there?
Is no one going to ask what the OB appointment was for? (Look how nosy I am!)