Emma at 16 Months

Scrap Credits
All You Need Is Love QP from Delicious Scraps

Weight

Around 7.3 – 7.4 kilos.  Slowly but surely gaining weight.

Height/Length

Not measured, but I can see she is growing taller because her head is almost hitting the table top when she walks under the table.

Teeth

9 teeth: 4 bottom teeth (4 incisors) and 5 upper teeth (3 incisors and 2 canines).  A few more teeth are sprouting too, as we speak, but she won’t open her mouth long enough for me to examine them.

Motor Skills

• Emma is still not confident to walk unsupported, probably because of her sleep-n-plays, which she has to wear to prevent scratching.  I’ve seen her take one step unsupported and then sit down. She is very adept at cruising and moving along couches, tables and such.  She also loves pushing toys around and using them as support.  Sometimes I let her wear shoes on top of her sleep-n-plays so that she gets a firmer grip on the floor.
• She can climb up flights of stairs on all fours now.
• Very advanced pincer’s grip and she can locate minuscule specks of dirt on the floor.
• She is a very fast learner.  When I do our nightly prayer sessions with the elder kids, and I say “Let’s Pray”, Emma will quickly put her hands in prayer position.

Communication and Social Skills

• She waves “buh bye” independently and does it when we are ready to leave a room.
• Loves to play “chase” with us when we pretend to chase her around the house.
• Vaguely saying these few words: “dog”, “ball”
• Reaches out and extends her hands when she wants to be carried.

Food and Feeding

Emma is still drinking mostly Mommy’s milk with an increased love for grapes and homecooked porridge.

Some of the foods she has tried this month:

• Tortilla
• Mango
• Hainanese Chicken Rice (just the rice, without the chicken and soy sauce)

She is also able to use the straw to drink.  I “trained” her using the actual straw and was surprised she was able to use it after a couple of attempts.  She still bites on the straw though .

Earlier this month, we had a scare when I fed her some salmon porridge.  I was quite happy at first when she downed it with gusto, however almost immediately I noticed Emma’s lips were very swollen and she had rashes all over her face.  I quickly attributed it to allergy, and since she had had nothing new that day, it was very possible that the allergic reaction could be due to the salmon in her porridge.  I breastfed her and fell asleep and thankfully after an hour or so of monitoring the swelling subsided and she was back to her old cheerful self.

There’s a high possibility she could have reacted strongly to some kind of preservatives in the salmon we bought because I recently tried with salmon porridge again (this time salmon from a different source) and Emma was okay with it.