18 months of Blaise!

We've had a quiet couple of weeks. We're in a good routine with daycare. Blaise has been absolutely loving being around other kids during the day. Mom and Dad are boring. She's especially excited about water play and buggy rides, even faking a lost shoe to prolong a buggy ride. (Okay, so maybe I'm giving her too much credit, but her lost shoe did prolong a buggy ride and she wasn't too upset about that.) We also went swimming with her friend Leo last week, which was lots of fun. Otherwise, pretty quiet. Maybe even boring. But I've said it before: As far as we're concerned, boring is good.

Today, however, we had a double-header of appointments. First up was Blaise's 18 month well-baby check-up. 18 months! How did that happen? We love our pediatrician because he has no reservations about declaring Blaise's progress to be amazing. Who doesn't want to hear things like "She's just amazing! I've never even heard of any kid doing so well after all she's been through!" Her growth continues to be good (possibly because she keeps eating entire avocado halves) and she's very healthy. She got a couple of shots with hardly any fussing and then we hit the Au Bon Pain for a croissant.

Then we went home for her 1-year Early Intervention re-evaluation. They didn't tell us anything we didn't already know. Her gross motor is almost completely caught up. Her fine motor is, and always has been, pretty solid. Her social development and receptive language are ridiculously good. Her expressive language is age-appropriate, as is her cognition. The only thing she's still behind on is feeding. We knew that and it makes some sense. She didn't start eating normally (as much as she wants by mouth) until she was 6 months old, solids were start-and-stop while we resolved the colitis issues last fall and we've been rather conservative with what we let her eat (we're getting more relaxed). So she has the feeding skills of a 14 month old, which isn't disastrous and will probably improve rapidly, especially since daycare has been a real boon to her eating. We've seen big improvement with her drinking from a cup even in just the 3 weeks of daycare so far. Hooray for peer models!