Sydney Update

Sydney is 19 months now ....... my, how time has flown...

In the last month, Sydney started saying sentences with multiple words. "Uncle...Bye Bye...All Gone" was her first 3 word sentence. My favorite sentence so far is "Mama, good girl". She recently learned "[Where] are you?" and goes around the apartment loudly calling for her stuff animals, people in her books and food (as in "Milk. [Where] are you!") I have to be much more vigilant in my word choice around her. I thought I heard her say "F-ing" the other day but I'm not sure. I hear her in her crib at night talking to herself -- basically calling out random words that she knows. Thanks to a fabulous set of books from her Aunt Cassi for Christmas, she's learning new words every day ---- new words learned this week: grasshopper, kangaroo and kite.

The hardest part about traveling with Sydney isn't the traveling itself. It is after we get home and I have to get her back on her regular schedule --- specifically, getting her to willingly go to sleep in her own room without my being there too. After a week of sleeping in the same room with me in Hong Kong, she's not eager to go back to our prior sleeping routine. The only way that I can correct that is to keep her up an hour later than she usually sleeps so that she would be too tired to carry on a prolonged tantrum. We are making progress because she slept at her usual bedtime tonight and only cried for a minute before drifting off to sleep.

I bought Sydney several books for Christmas and as a result she has stopped asking me to read to her Corduroy and Monkey Puzzle (thank goodness). She still enjoys Goodnight, Moon. Her new favorite book is "Llama Llama, Red Pajama" --- it is mine too. Although I do find myself saying the rhymes in my head while I'm at work. At the gym. At the grocery store. In the shower. Doing the dishes. Typing this blog.

We started potty training a couple of weeks ago. Don't worry, I didn't take any pictures of this process. She's been exhibiting signs of being ready for over a month now but I've been postponing it because she is so young. But I also fear that if we don't start the training now when she's interested in it then she'll loose interest and it will be more difficult to train her later. Because she is so little, I had a hard time finding a potty that she could sit on comfortably. I had to buy one for her classroom too because the kiddie potties at school are too big for her, and I think that falling into the toilet would be a discouraging experience:)

Sydney is willing to sit on the potty when I ask her to, but doesn't do so on her own yet. She has "gone" in the potty a couple of times a day for the past couple of days. So I think that we are making progress. I don't have any potty training books with me here so I'm just winging it. If anyone has any suggestions regarding how to go about this, I would GREATLY appreciate it.