Our little Sponge

Bundling up to take Tucker for a December jog!

 At 16.5 months, Summer is like a little sponge, picking up words, facial expressions, actions, and so much more!  Here are a few things she has been learning lately:

**Manners**
Summer has been learning to say please, thank you, and excuse me (when she burps or needs someone to move).  She will say excuse me on her own for the most part, but often (but not always!) needs reminders on her please's and thank you's.

**Helping around the House**
-Summer helps me fold laundry--she knows where the wash cloths and her socks go, so while I am folding laundry, she will dig in the basket and find them and go and put them away without me saying anything!
-Summer this week learned how to match socks.  I will hold one sock and ask her "Where is the other one?" and she will find the matching sock out of the pile of all the socks.
-Summer will take the dryer sheet out of the laundry basket and say "garbage" and go put it in the garbage all by herself without me saying anything.  She will also pick up scraps of paper (all be it that she ripped the paper herself!!!) and say "garbage" and go put it in the garbage.
-Summer knows where her toys go and will help me pick up her toys and put them away.  Today she put away a pile of about 10-12 toys that had "homes" in three rooms different from where we were playing,  and she put them all in the correct place while I sat and watched and asked her to "put this one away".

**Taking care of Tucker**
-Today Summer said "more" and pointed at Tucker's water bowl when it was empty.
-Summer will walk to Tucker's treat cabinet and will ask for a bone for Tucker.
-Summer will say "Good Boy" when Tucker "stays".

**Colors**
-We are still working on our colors, but in this video you can see a clip of us practicing!

**Shapes**
-While this particular video does not showcase her best puzzle skills ;), it does show you a few of the shapes she knows.

**Character**

While the length of Summer's tantrums has dramatically decreased over the past month, she has found other ways to test :).  Today she started hiding food in her bib that she didn't want to eat so that she could get more of what she wanted.  (Where does she learn this?!?!)  Lately, we have been working on patience, and we sing "the patience" song while we wait for things (like food to be heated in the microwave) and, because she enjoys the song, is a lot more patient in waiting for her food.  We have also recently been working on how she should correctly deal with frustration.  She is very easily frustrated.  For example, when she tries to, say, carry play food on a pretend plate, and the food falls off the plate, she gets very frustrated and throws it all down and cries.  Frustration also can come out in a form of hitting when she is frustrated with Mommy.  In the last day or two we have started to see a bit of success in this area, but we are still working on it!  The newest form of obedience we just started working on is "coming when called".  Now that Summer understands what mommy wants, she will sometimes choose to walk the other way and ignore Mommy, so we are working on that right now too!

**Prayer**

Summer and I pray every morning after we read our Bible story, before breakfast, before lunch, before dinner (with daddy), and before bed (with daddy).  Summer will fold her hands and wait patiently for us to finish praying.  Today her friend Addison was having surgery so we were going to pray for her before breakfast.  She is always quiet while we pray, but today, in the middle of the prayer, before I had mentioned Addison's name, she shouted out ADDISON (because she saw her picture on the fridge).  It was pretty cute, because it was almost like she was praying for Addison too :).