18 Months!!

A year and a half?!?  How did this happen? 

Life with a one and a half year old is, well, busy.
Here's the things going on around our house lately:

• Loves helping with laundry and picking up. 
• Climbing.  Oh lordy, the climbing.  He's climbing on everything - we are in the process of strapping furniture as we speak.  Not only is he climbing, he's now jumping off of things now too.  Not from very high and usually he'll only jump off onto a pile of pillows or blankets but I'm going to have to keep a close eye on this dare devil.
• He is now starting to run from us when we try to take something away from him.  Great.
• Loves his big duplo legos and LOVES to stack things.  He is really good at it too - it is pretty impressive actually.  His hand-eye coordination is really good.  He gets really excited when he gets a high stack going - he yells in excitement after he stacks another thing on top and then turns his head to the side to "inspect" it.
• He's absolutely obsessed with balls. 
• He LOVES to go outside.  He'll spend hours outside with Aaron.
• He loves to hop and dance around his room naked after he gets out of the bath.  He also dances pretty much anytime he hears music.
• He knows how to "blow his nose" - and does it often if he pulls the wipes out on his own.  He is also starting to  blow on his food if it's hot.
• He starting to use utensils more consistently.  So far it seems he favors his right hand.
• He is saying and babbling more - we think he's right on the verge of a word explosion.  So far he can say: hi, bye, mama, dada, hi dada, bubba, bubble, ball, papa. go, no, apple, up, eye, ahba for bath, ilk for milk, ckk for truck, out for outside, aahh (with a scrunched up face) for hot.  Starting to say thank you and I love you but it's not very consistent.
• He says "eye, eye, eye" when I sing Old McDonald and "boom boom" when I sing The Ants Go Marching
• Understands pretty well what we say to him and is starting to be able to express what he wants.  Signs "more" all the time.  I love the way he does it - he takes his thumb from right hand and hits it to the palm of his left hand rather than hitting closing his fingers and hitting them together.  And he uses the sign as a "Yes, I want this/that" sign as well as using it for "more".  He has started shaking his head "no" for just about everything and also saying "Noo, noo, nooo" in a cute little voice.  Right now it's cute - I'm sure it won't be later when he's yelling it!  
• He is still in the crib - and I think he will be for a while.  He rolls around sooo much in the middle of the night that I'm afraid he'd fall out of bed nightly if we move him to a big boy bed.  He does well in his crib still and he sleeps well in there so I don't want to disrupt that sooner than we have to.  And he hasn't figured out how to crawl out of it yet...so, fingers crossed! 
• We haven't really started potty training with him.  I don't think he's anywhere near ready.  We did buy him a little potty seat that we just sit him on right before his bath just to get him used to it. 
• Our next thing to work on is getting rid of the pacifier!  Yikes.  I'm dreading it.

At his 18 month check-up the doctor wasn't concerned about anything and thinks Aaden is doing well.  He was 27 lbs - 70th percentile,  31 3/4" - 50th percentile, and his head circumference was only in the 10th percentile!  I think he's going to have a small head like his Daddy.

Stacker
(taken before his haircut)

Messer

 Cheeser

Reader

Cutie

Piggy

Rody