BB learned a few neat things this past month! We can see things starting to click in his brain.
He can turn on/off all his electronic toys by himself now with the little on/off switch that most of them have. We never taught him that because we wanted to be able to control the amount of toys he has turned on at a time. Otherwise he would do what he does now...gather all the toys around him and press every single button so that every toy is making noise at the same time. But once he learned how to do it on one toy, he did it on all of them. So now there is a lot of electronic music all the time.
He knows the sounds of all the letters in the alphabet except N (I think he thinks M and N are the same thing),O, and U-Z. My family got him the Leapfrog Letter Alphabet DVD for Christmas and we just stuck it into his regular rotation of Baby Einstein and Elmo DVD's. It's a phonics based way of learning the alphabet, which I'm a big fan of since that's how I learned to read. We didn't thing he would get much from it other than liking the song since we thought he might be a little too young to actually understand the content. We didn't really reinforce what the video taught that much other than occasionally singing the letter songs when he pointed to the letters in his alphabet book.
This week, we just asked him, "what does the 'A' say?" And he replied, "aah". But he sometimes runs around the house screaming, "aaaaah," so we thought it was coincidence. So we asked him what "B" said, and he said, "buh". Again, we though it was coincidence since it's his favorite sound to make now (Papa loves it since he just says Ba Ba all day). We asked him a few more letters and to our surprise, he knew a lot of them! Even the weird ones, like "Q". I think we never expected him to be able to replicate the sounds because he's still not a great talker. He hasn't hit his vocabulary explosion yet, so he hasn't really added many more words since last month...and most of his words are unrecognizable to anyone other than me and PB. It was the most pleasantly surprising thing.
It also made us realize that he will pick up on almost anything, so we had better watch ourselves around him 
He figured out how to open doors and how to unlatch the lock to the basement door. Luckily most of our doors are the original solid wood doors that was built with the house...and over the years, the wood has expanded...so our doors all have a very tight fit against the door jam. So even though he can successfully turn the knob, he isn't strong enough to pull the door open.
He is slowly getting better at following directions, even when he doesn't want to do it (even though he understands it every time we tell him). He will sit down 75% of them time when you tell him to. But he will test his limits. Slowly getting to his knees while he's on a chair to see if you'll allow that. I will allow as far as kneeling on a chair. Once one foot becomes planted on the chair, I tell him to sit down. But he will try to get that one leg up slowly as if you won't notice if he does it slowly (and he's watching me the entire time to see what I will do). Sometimes he just can't help himself and will just jump on the chairs and bed even after we tell him to sit down. Right after we tell him no and before we can reach him, he jumps like a maniac because he knows when we get to him, it's all over.
When we tell him we're going outside, he'll run over to where we keep his jacket and bring the jacket over to us. He'll grab his shoes and attempt to put them on (but just placing them on top of his feet).
He'll put stuff away when we tell him to. But it usually last a second before he throws everything back on the ground. It's as if he can't stand for things to be orderly.
We started taking him to the pool at the Y and he loves it. He'll paddle his arms and kick his legs and play with the pool toys. He usually only lasts about half hour before he gets too cold. He is quite the handful in the locker room. I now make PB join me in the family dressing room because I can't get him to stay by me while I'm getting dressed....he's always running away to ogle other women getting dressed.
He has picked up an annoying habit this month. He'll come over to one of us, grab our finger and pull us over to join him to play. Sounds cute right? We thought so too in the beginning and we went willingly all the time. Until now, he's always trying to drag us places even if we're busy doing something else and he'll throw a fit if we don't go with him. He also will sometimes just drag you places and leave you there while he goes off to play somewhere else. I can't tell you how many times I've been abandoned in his tent.
We finally went to his 15 month appointment about 2 weeks ago at 16.5 months. tee hee. The receptionist was giving me crap about that, but I was trying to explain that with the timing of his vaccinations, flu shots, sick visits (we went in a week before his 15 month bday) and well visit, we would have to be back there like 3 times in a month. So I just waited until he was due for the flu shot to bring him in to get everything all at once. She didn't get it. I was like whatever, lady, just make me the appointment.
At 16.5 months, he measured in at 33" (83 %ile) and 23 pounds (19%ile). This was the first visit since his 3 month visit that his weight had not dropped in %ile. It actually went up 2%ile, which isn't a lot, but it seems like he has stabilized. So our chunky 90%ile infant is now a long and lean toddler.
I look forward to seeing what 1.5 years bring us!
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