17 months

And another month has passed. I swear I just wrote about Isaac turning 16 months and now he's 17 months... If anyone ever wanted time to speed up, they should just have babies.

Isaac is more and more a boy with each month. I've already noticed significant differences between him and Mia (when he was her age), and it's made me realize that I basically have to relearn parenting in a lot of ways because boys and girls are so different. I've been reading Jo Frost's "Toddler Rules", because Isaac's temper tantrums are way too frequent for my liking and I want to start getting some techniques under my belt early on.

I have friends who are telling me how their two year olds are starting to have tantrums, and I have to laugh because Isaac has been having full blown flail on the ground-scream-bang my head tantrums since before he was a year.

Just kidding. I don't laugh.

But with his increasing mobility and learning, he's starting to add new tantrum tricks to his arsenal. Slamming cupboard doors, throwing everything within a 2 foot radius, scratching, biting, kicking, hitting...

I decided it was time to try some different methods for managing them. If anything, they help me stay more calm during his outbursts, and that is huge for calming him down. It's definitely a work in progress.

I know I'm making him sound like a total nightmare, but there are a million things about my big boy that I love to bits and those are the things I'm going to focus on. He is just a strong-willed child so the crazy tantrums are just part of the territory.

Isaac weighed 22lbs9oz (15th percentile) and measured 31 inches (30th percentile). His head is in the 60th.

He finally has all four molars bringing the tooth count up to 12.

His new words include: Jesus (he can also point to pictures of him at home, in his scripture book, and at church), on, thank you, wow/woah/ooooh (to almost everything), uh oh, juice.

He loves playing in the fort I make from throwing a blanket over Mia's playmat.

He loves pretending to cook and then pretends to taste whatever he has made while saying "mmmmm".

He helps me with most of the chores: laundry (he puts his dirty clothes in his own basket, helps me load the washer and dryer, and gets to press all the buttons to turn it on), dishes, vacuuming, unloading the dishwasher, picking up food he's dropped on the floor, and setting the table. He loves to help and always has a big smile when he does something that I've asked.

Note the overturned chairs in the back to "prevent" him from climbing

He is a climbing machine and attempts to climb pretty much everything. He can scale the change table and has figured out how to climb on the overturned chair legs to reach what he wants. I used to let him stand on a chair and play with kitchen stuff at the counter. Then he figured out he could get down, push the chair wherever he wanted and climb back up. Now I have to supervise a lot more vigilantly...

He wasn't supposed to climb in...

He claps for me after I sing a song.

He loves the toilet and although the bathroom door remains closed, sometimes I find random bath toys greeting me when I go to pee. His toothbrush was the most recent toilet casualty. Luckily we had a spare on hand.

We have a super magnet keeping Isaac from opening the oven door, but need to take it off when stuff is actually in the oven. He managed to sneak a toy car in there (after it was turned off but before the magnet was back on), and Gordon neglected to tell me about it. Apparently he knew? Let's just say I was lucky I decided to put dinner in the oven before it was done preheating, something I normally don't do, and found the poor little car with it's wheel melting just before who knows what happened.

He is obsessed with Gordon's computer. We don't really let him play on it, but if Gordon's computer chair is up (it's usually overturned as well), he is like lightning in getting to it and climbing up. He even knows the sound the cushion makes if Gordon gets up, and is off running to the chair before you can even blink if he hears it. If he does succeed in getting up, he has this ultimate look of triumph on his face, and then proceeds to talk excited gibberish to himself while tapping on the keyboard and moving the mouse like an expert. You should see the tantrums when we take him down. They are EPIC.

Sitting in daddy's chair

He can find about half the shapes in his shape sorter on his own, and could probably do them all if he had the patience to sit there. A few nights ago he even correctly pointed to the circle, heart, star, square, triangle and rectangle when I asked him where they were.


He is learning his numbers and likes to count to 3 with me. Then claps for himself. Pretty modest little guy I have.

He treats Mia like she's his age. This is often problematic for obvious reasons, but I'm pretty sure when they're both toddlers, it will be AWESOME.

I love my big boy and hope that by doing these monthly posts, I can immortalize all these moments and memories for myself to look back on with joy and laughter...and maybe a little sigh of relief:)