Happy 16 Months!

Today Jack turns 16 months! I am just floored how big he is getting now. Today was the first time that he took his backpack to daycare. And oh my gosh does he love that backpack. He insisted on wearing it out to get into the car. Then he had to hang on to it during the drive to daycare, he was not letting it out of his sight. And he insisted on wearing it from the car to the door at daycare. He was so cute walking up the driveway like one of the big kids with his backpack on and you could tell he was so proud of himself. Then he walked in the door, took the backpack off, handed it to Mam, and off he walked into the playroom. Not even so much as a goodbye or anything to me. Sigh, he is not a baby anymore! It made me think of when he goes off to school for the first time. I am going to be a basket case! I have to learn to appreciate every moment I have with him because it is only going to be a blink of an eye and he will be walking into school. Sigh.

So on this 16 month birthday, I thought I would go through some things that Jack has been doing lately.

He has been saying "Maaa" all the time. Anytime he wants anything, or wants to get my attention, he says "Maaa". If he doesn't get what he wants, he just says it over and over and over and louder and louder each time. Thousands of times a day now I hear "Maaa".

He loves to eat ice. If anybody has a glass of ice water, he will go straight over to them and beg for the ice out of the glass. So sure enough he has all of us trained to constantly fish out pieces of ice out of our glasses for him.

When he walks around the house now, he will many times hold his hands behind his back. It is so cute watching him just moseying around with his hands behind his back.

He is now tall enough to reach the top of the countertops in the kitchen. So that means we really have to watch what we put on the countertop near the edge because he will get it, especially if it is a dangerous object.

He loves phones. He will hold up pretty much any object to his ear, be it a phone or a spoon, and pretend to talk into it. It is so cute to hear him babble like he is on the phone. But the thing is when somebody like Grandma and Grandpa are on the end of a real phone saying "Hi Jack", all he does is look at the phone like he is thinking "what in the world is that noise".

He has an obsession about my makeup. He goes into the bathroom and opens the drawer that it is in and loves to play with it. The other morning, I caught him playing with a tube of lipstick and he had it all over him. I don't think I realized how hard lipstick was to get off legs, hands, neck until I tried to clean him up. It doesn't come out! He will also carry it off to other regions of the house. I found my blush case in his crib the other day. I guess he took it there for safekeeping? And just this morning, he had the blush brush in his hand and was actually brushing it on his cheek just like Mommy! I told Jim about this and he said "what are you doing to my son?".

He is so much fun these days. During those hard weeks in the newborn phase, I kept telling myself that it does get better. I think that time has come.