20 Months

Wow, Jacob has grown a lot this month! He is really starting to show his personality, and he is quite the goofy, mischievous little boy. As you can see in the video above, Jacob is now starting to climb all over. He loves climbing on the sofa, in particular, and we have had to block it off with chairs a few times to keep him from injuring himself. He is also starting to communicate what he wants (or doesn't want) much better. We have been doing more sign language with him, and this has really helped improve our communication. He now knows the signs for more, milk, food, bird, pig, sheep, help, and stop. With our next child, I want to start doing sign language a lot earlier since we have seen Jacob catch on and use it so much just in the past two months. He continues to slowly start to use his verbal language a bit more, and he has started trying to say names. He can now say the names of his cousins Ava and Asher, and he can say Abby (the sign language teacher), and Papa (Grandpa). We still notice him trying to say other new words, but he's still pretty inconsistent when it comes to saying them more than once.
The biggest change we have seen this month is in Jacob's sleeping habits. I am happy to say that it seems Jacob is finally sleeping through the night! He started doing this every few nights this month, but over the past 5 days or so he has been consistently sleeping all night. We still help him get to sleep, but this is not a big deal at all. I am just so happy that he has finally learned this skill and is able to get all the sleep he needs each night.
Jacob definitely looks more like a little boy now, and it is so fun to watch him act like a little boy rather than a baby. It's hard to believe that he'll be a 2 year old in just 4 months. Time sure does fly when you're having fun with such a little sweetheart!

19 Months Old

Well, our little man is another month older. He is slowly starting to add some new words to his vocabulary such as "oh no," "apple" (app-oh), "open" (obeh), and "grandpa" (papa). We have also noticed that he will try to say other words sometimes, so this is very exciting and shows that his language is finally starting to take off. He can also sign the words "clean up" and "stop." Another new thing he likes to do is scream at the top of his lungs, which is not very amusing when he's doing it in the middle of Target.
Naptime has been going really well, although he usually just falls asleep in the car on the way home from errands or another morning activity. Bedtime is also going well, but he still wakes up once most nights. We still bring him into our bed then, but we've decided that once he turns two he won't be allowed in our bed anymore.
We're still having a lot of fun going to different activities during my time off. We got to go to Disney in the middle of June, which Jacob loved. Once we got back we picked back up with our weekly storytimes and local activities. On Mondays we go to storytime at the library, Tuesday we started having music class downtown, and on Thursdays we go to Stroll & Sign. It's fun to have these activities to look forward to each week. We also got to go to the Children's Museum in Bloomington and visit the  Riverfront Museum for fireworks on the Fourth of July. It's been a lot of fun seeing Jacob explore new things and learn.
I guess that's about it for this month. Our little buddy is getting so big!

Sandbox

18 Months Old- What a big boy!

Jacob no longer seems like a baby anymore and is truly a toddler. He has really started doing a lot of new things in just the past two weeks, including trying to say a lot of new words. His speech has been pretty slow, so it is exciting to finally hear him saying new words or repeating ones that he knows really well. Some of the new words he says now include purple, bubbles (bubbo), Bible (that one really surprised us when he said it!), and uh oh. We continue to encourage his speech, so I'm looking forward to hearing him say more words each day. In addition to new words, Jacob's new teeth are coming in- bringing him to a total of 14 teeth! I can't believe he has so many, but I'm looking forward to the end of teething.
Jacob now gets to stay home with Mommy all the time, since I am on summer break. We have already done a lot of exciting things, including going to the Farm Park (he touched one of the goats and loved looking at the rabbits), story time at the library, and something called "Stroll and Sign" (a stroller walk followed by some sign language). When it's nice we are outside as much as possible. I have a ton of ideas from pinterest, and so far we've already done some finger painting, made colored ice cubes to play with outside, used sidewalk chalk, and even painted with Kool-Aid. In addition to these activities, I usually take him on a walk in the stroller each day and plan to take him to the pool several times a week. He definitely loves being outside and is good at climbing the steps on the playground jungle gym and is able to go down the small slide by himself.
A few weeks ago I bought a stuffed animal that plays music and projects lights on the ceiling at bedtime, and that has really helped Jacob to fall asleep in his crib. He still wants one of us to rub his tummy or back until he's asleep, but we don't really rock with him at all when it's bedtime. I still want him to be able to fall asleep on his own (or at least not freak out if we leave the room), but I'm thankful for the progress we've seen so far. We've been able to keep his bedtime pretty consistent (around 8:00), whereas in the past it's been anywhere from 6:30-10:00. It's nice knowing that he'll actually fall asleep the first time we take him back for bedtime. We still have 1-2 night wakings, but we just bring him to bed with us until morning. He typically wakes up for the day around 5:30 or 6:00.
I guess those are all the updates I can think of. Below are some pictures of Jacob from this past week:

Laughing at Daddy

Blueberries & Bustin' a Move

No, No

This is from a book of his that says, "No, No"