Life as a 13 month old

JT continues to love life as a toddler and we are embracing this new part of life he brings our family. Gone are the times where we don't have to worry about what is on the counter or on the floor. Forget sleeping in on the weekend (unless your awesome spouse decides to get up with JT alone). Easy communication- nope! Pain and agony from molars that have been coming in for well over a month- you bet! However, JT has such a pure joy for life in all he does and the love he brings out in each one of us makes up for all of those things mentioned above and then some.

It seems like JT is just taking off into being a "little person" as I say sometimes. He is starting to try to communicate more, but since he can't really talk well it can be a challenge. We have had some great success so far doing sign language for some basic language for JT. Like I posted a few weeks ago, JT can sign please and all done. We have now moved on to teaching "more", "eat", "Daddy", "ball", "milk", and "thank you". JT says Dada already but its so cute to see him sign it while he says it too. What JT does often is when we are eating something or preparing a meal, he will come up to us and verbalize a noise that expresses he wants a bite and then he will sign please over and over. SO CUTE! I like using the sign language since it empowers JT to let us know his needs even though he can't say the words quite yet. I'm hoping this will let us have a less frustrated toddler as he wants to communicate more.

Another major thing happened this past month- JT is now bottle free!!!! Yay!!! A few days after his 1st birthday we decided that it was time to move to sippy cups. It's recommended to wean from the bottle by 1 year for different reasons, so we didn't want to delay much. We figured it would only be more difficult to "break" if we waited longer, so bye bye bottles. JT handled the transition quite well- the first few days he was a little upset in the morning when he was offered a sippy cup instead of his bottle, but other than that he did wonderful. He was only really taking 2 bottles a day at that point- waking in the morning and right before bed- and sippy cups all during the day so it wasn't a huge change for him.

Another thing we discovered is that it looks like JT is allergic to peanut butter. The Dr. gave permission to offer PB to JT after his well check. So one day I gave him a bit of PB on a cracker. About 20 minutes later, JT had about 6-8 hives on just his face. Poor guy had a few right under his eye so he kept rubbing his eyes like crazy. So I gave him Benedryl and he cleared up soon after. Not sure what this means for allergies, but PB is off limits until I talk to the Dr. again.

In the meantime, we introduce new foods one at a time to make sure there aren't any allergies. Here JT is trying mandarin oranges-

JT is a very active little boy- never stopping until he's sleeping to recharge for the next round. Sometimes even when he's sleeping, he gets into trouble! Check out these pictures. He got into this position more than once last week. We had to rescue his little legs a few times so he wouldn't get stuck. Always something new with this sweet boy!

Lastly, though we have been doing this for some time, I have not taken any pictures of this- brushing JT's teeth! We bought JT a toddler toothbrush last week and he likes the size much better than the adult one we had been using. I think the brush also feels good on the tender gums from the molars that are being stubborn in coming up.