Miss Juliette hit the sixteen-month mark on Wednesday – at some point in the past few weeks I stopped referring to her as a baby and started calling her a toddler. Â She’s increasingly curious, increasingly communicative, increasingly funny and sweet and, let’s be honest, increasingly maddening as she has recently perfected the arched-back, rigid-as-a-board, screaming-bloody-murder temper tantrum. Â But we’ll save my tantrum woes for another day, because there really is so much good stuff to report:
She’s added a host of new words to her vocabulary – there’s a bit of translation required, but she’s slowly making herself understood.  Favorite words are wa-wa (water), nana (banana), UPUPUPPP?! (put me up on the bed or couch, please), shucks (socks), and sheeeeesh (shoes), often muttered as I hear the crackle of velcro being undone in the backseat.  No matter how short our car ride, I always find her barefoot by the time we arrive at our destination.
Favorite toys are her wooden puzzles, anything with a lid that can be snapped or screwed on and off, and her ever-trusty Mega-Bloks. Â She’s put together some pretty impressive towers – they’re not necessarily structurally sound, but gosh, they’re tall!
We still while away the evenings with a stack of books…
And when the rain puts a damper on our park plans, we dance! I will watch this video each time she has one of those afore-mentioned tantrums and I need a reminder of what a joy she really is.
Dress-up is a new fun pastime – she loves to rummage around in our entryway baskets and pull out my scarves and hats.
Oven mitts are another favorite accessory.
Blue steel?
Other hobbies include pulling every single bottle and tube and q-tip out of the bathroom drawers, turning the TV on and off and on and off, and lifting up her dad’s shirt and sticking her finger in his belly button as hard as she can.
We also started swim lessons a couple of weeks ago and spend our Thursday mornings doing laps at the nearby pool.  Juliette likes the water, but it was a little unfortunate to pull out the 18-24 month swimsuit I had picked up in the fall and find that she had already outgrown it – she was like a sausage, stuffed into that thing!
The 2T tankini I bought as a replacement was hardly much better. Â That belly! Â Good for buoyancy, though, right?
And can we talk about her hair for a minute? Â Oy vey.
If you had told me two years ago that I’d have a little girl with red-golden curls, this isn’t quite what I would have had in mind. Â She often looks like a hobbit when we pull her out of bed in the morning, bare-footed and mop-topped.
But we’re rolling with it.  It goes so well with her happy-go-lucky demeanor!
We call this her Pantene audition video…
Happy sixteen months, giggle-pants. Â You’re a regular laugh a minute.
