Delilah’s 18 Month Well-Baby Checkup
Delilah had her 18-month-old baby checkup recently and it made me realize just how close we are to having a two-year-old! Every parent says it, but the time really does go by so fast. I try not to focus on being sad about her growing up though because as she gets older because, with each year, there’s more and more she can do, and that’s so exciting.
As always, before her appointment, her doctor’s office sent us the Ages and Stages Questionnaire for her age group. Filling out the ASQ has been a great way to keep track and know that she’s developing certain skills when she should. Sometimes when I read the questions on there, there are some like “can your baby get a cheerio out of a small bottle,” that I didn’t even realize were developmental milestones to watch for. This time on the 18-month Questionnaire, there wasn’t anything really surprising.
I think the only area I ended up answering “not yet” was a question about using 3 words together with a meaning like “mama come play,”. We’re still working on getting her to use 2-word phrases like “book please”. She was doing really well for a while, especially when the second word in the phrase was “please” or “thank you”, but recently she’s been sticking to one-word commands and gestures. We’ve been trying to use a lot of two-word phrases but now rather than saying the second word after us she’s started just nodding her head in agreement. So, when I ask her to say please after coming up to me and demanding I get her “moo,” (milk), she just starts nodding her head “yes”.
Speaking of language development, there was a question on the ASQ, where it asked “does your child know more than 8 words, not including mama and Dada?”. Reading this question made me stop and realize just how many words Delilah already knows! We’re finally at the point where I can’t keep count anymore. She’s also surprising us all the time when we figure out a new word she’s saying that we didn’t necessarily try to teach her. Just goes to show how much babies are always listening and learning. At Delilah’s actual appointment she was really showing off how many words she knew. She was getting so excited when the nurses and her doctor would comment to her about the words she knew. At one point, her nurse thought that Delilah was trying to tell her that she had an owie when really, she was talking about a poster of an owl on the wall. She also was showing off that she knows her colors too by saying the color of everything she saw in the office.
The rest of her visit was fairly straightforward. We talked a bit about Delilah’s nutrition which we can best describe as “we’re working on it,”. She’s a bit of a picky eater, but that’s okay and it could definitely be a lot worse. It has helped us a lot just finding the foods she really likes from each food group and letting her eat a lot of that. I’m grateful that she still likes a lot of healthy and nutritious food like yogurt and fruit, she’s just particular about which ones. We’ve recently had a win in the nutrition department when we discovered that she loves Spaghetti squash noodles. It felt really good to finally find a vegetable she truly liked eating. I bought two more the next time we went to the store.
She only had one shot today and I was excited to hear she wouldn’t have any at her next appointment after her second birthday. Unfortunately, my hope of her not noticing the shot since it was only one did not come true. She was still aware of what was going on despite my efforts to distract her with her new book. She was very upset for a minute but quickly calmed down by telling me she wanted to go see da-da, who was waiting out in the car. Since she was in a better mood we stopped and did a little shopping before heading home for a nap and cuddles!