14 Months Old

Mena turns 14 months old today. Here she is playing her piano that we've borrowed from my friend Tess. Mena can make music with the keys on the bar with her hands and she can make music by stepping on the keys at the bottom. What a great toy!

On October 13th Mena started cruising next to the furniture and on November 6th she started walking with a push toy alone. Her development has been doing great since I'm staying home with her. We did have LPS evaluate her this month. The scores from their tests show that Mena is right on the dividing line between her development being behind and her development being on the low side of average. Two of the women on the team evaluating her were familiar with me since they'd worked with children in my classroom when I worked at St. Mark's. One of the women came to our house to finish her evaluation of Mena. At the end of her evaluation she said she thought I was doing great with Mena and that with my background I'd have Mena caught up in no time. She asked if I wanted to just keep doing it on my own or if I wanted her to qualify Mena for help through LPS. I told her that I'd spent the last 7 1/2 years working with 3 year olds and that I would appriciate the help LPS could give me since I was spending a lot of time trying to research what a one year old needs to learn and how to break each skill down into things that Mena could master. Just in the couple of hours that we spent with the specialists from LPS they gave me 3 or 4 activities I could do at home with her that are really helping. We won't hear for sure until next week, but we'll probably start having a teacher come each week to our house to work with Mena and I on her gross motor and fine motor development.

This month Mena has also started showing her opinions more. I moved her up into size 4 shoes. While at Target I found 2 different tennis shoes that fit her. I held them both up for her to choose between. One was white with a little pink and the other was pink and purple. She took both shoes from me but then set the white ones aside and kept playing with the pink and purple ones. Then we needed to get her some mittens. I found a set of solid pink and a set of pink and grey striped. She took the striped ones out of my hand both times that I held the two sets up. Last we went to pick out a toothbrush. I held up an orange and yellow one with Elmo and a orange and green one with Big Bird. She literally shoved Elmo aside and grabbed Big Bird out of my hand!

Our home scale shows Mena at just over 23 pounds. She's wearing size 18 month shirts and pants now. Our little girl isn't so little any more! This month she's also started clapping a lot! She gets excited and claps for herself or anything that makes her happy. She's a bundle of joy and we're enjoying our time with her!