All About Amy

Amy had what I'm deeming her 19-month checkup today. She weighs in at a hefty yet adorable 25 pounds, and I forget her height and head size but she's right on track for that. She also got a bunch of shots and I swear, the look she gave me afterwards was heartbreakingly hilarious - Mom, how could you do this to me? But even that should be more or less done with, since she won't have too many more immunizations scheduled, and she'll be better able to understand it when she does. Actually, Porter was really funny in the dorctor's office this morning: once we established that he wasn't having a shot (both he and Betsy got the H1N1 through the schools, and it was a mist) he informed me that Amy wasn't going to have one either. I don't know if this is because he didn't want to see her hurt (Porter has his moments of being a really solicitous and loving older brother, like when he and Amy went to Egypt while I was making dinner last night) or if he just didn't want to hear her cry.

Anyway, Amy is now or will soon be immune to a whole host of nasty-but-largely-forgotten childhood diseases. Yay! She's also forgiven me for the thigh jabs. Our doctor's office has just added a nurse practitioner who doubles as a lactation consultant, and that's who we saw today, so I had a nice chat with her. I was slightly embarrassed to admit that my daughter is nineteen months old and still nursing, but she was impressed (or at least nice enough not to call me a freak). For what it's worth, the High Octane Mom Juice seems to be agreeing with Amy, since she's healthy, adorable and fat. Anyway, I told her that my goal is to get Amy off the sauce before her birthday, and she agreed that it probably wouldn't hurt to keep nursing her until winter cold/flu season is over, which is a point I hadn't even thought of. So, that gives me a little while to figure out how I am going to handle the Weaning Angst.

Mine, not Amy's.

We also chatted about Amy's speech development a bit. Now, I noticed about two or three months ago that while Amy had plenty to say, she wasn't so much for actual words. I'm perfectly willing to chalk that up to any manner of causes (her explosion of gross and fine motor around 13 months probably had a lot to do with it) but I also consider speech, hearing, and communication in general to be important enough that I don't mess around. So I called First Steps who came in and did an evaluation, and almost to my surprise they said that she did have a mild speech delay, so Amy's been getting speech therapy twice a month. The nice thing about speech therapy for a one-year-old is that it basically consists of a nice lady coming to our house with a huuuge bag of toys and giving Amy her undivided attention for an hour. Boy, that's really hard, right?

Anyway, Amy's had about four or five visits from Nice Lady With Toys, and I swear it has actually made a difference. Amy's gone from saying "hi," "bye-bye" and "Daaaaa" (her name for Daddy - it's not so much what she says, as how she says it) to having probably twenty or twenty-five words. Her Top Five right now are:

1. NO

2. Mine (Hmm, is someone the youngest of three kids?)

3. Bite

4. Daddy (she still doesn't know how to say my name, although Matt says she does, but if she only says it when I'm not around then it doesn't count)

5. Baby (Let me tell you, this child is fixated on dolls. She's either carrying around one of hers or one of Betsy's. I decided to go ahead and give her a Bitty Baby for her second birthday instead of her third. And because I'm AWESOME, I found one at a church sale for five bucks last weekend.)

So, that's my little girly in a nutshell. She continues to be the center of attention and probably will be for a long, long time. Actually at the moment she is trying to play Duck Duck Goose with me - this consists of saying "Dah? Dah? Dah?" and randomly patting my head, then running away. Then we're going to go to Meijer and see the fishies and I am going to bribe her with juice to let me do the grocery shopping.