Joe's "Mini-Me"

Our Nate is a dead ringer for his daddy. I hear it all the time..."how are you...haven't seen you in a while...oh my goodness...your baby looks EXACTLY like Joe!" It's true, he is very much like his daddy, including his funny walk and his cute smile!

Nate just turned 21 months. We finally took him to his 18 month check up today. We found that he is 33 1/2" tall, which is 50%. He weighs in at 29.6 pounds which is 75%. That is unusual for our family, usually the kids are taller percentile than weight, so I was a little worried about that, but then I remembered that at this age all of my children had suddenly become extremely picky eaters. Nate, however, is not picky. He is a fantastic eater. He loves meat, zucchini, broccoli, raw carrots, all fruits (except watermelon), and salad. The other night we went out to dinner and the waiter brought my dinner salad early. Nate got so excited and started pulling lettuce and tomatoes off my plate. It was a battle between him and I to see who could eat faster so that I could get any of the salad for myself. When my steak came out, it was the same story. He, however, doesn't really care for bread, except to lick the jelly off of it.
He is quite a joy of a kid, always going a hundred miles an hour. He loves tractors, he has found all the tractors in our house and prefers to play with those. His favorite activity is playing in the water at our bathtub...he turns the water on and then finds things in the house and gets them wet and throws them in the tub. So far nothing expensive has gotten ruined, but it is only a matter of time.

He's finally okay to go to nursery. He was very upset about the whole thing for a couple of months, but he goes more or less willingly now.

He's a very independent child. When we are at our property, if we are not watching him carefully, he will walk off, out of our sight trying to find someone. With him, it only takes a couple of seconds...so we have to watch him very carefully.

His vocabulary is really starting to take off. He says all sorts of things now, my favorite is "eee-aa" for clean up. In fact, he sings it as he starts to clean things up. His newest word is "mine" and its not pretty when he chooses to say it.

He has a happy demeanor, when he runs now he has a little half skip he does as he skips. If he's in a real hurry i.e. trying to run away from me, it is an all out run, but most of the time it is a little skip.

We've had the hardest time with his hair. He has a couple of cowlicks in the back, and his hair is super fine, so many times we will comb his hair down with gel and we can't get it to stay down. We are trying a new hair style with him and trying to let the top grow out, we will see how it goes.

We sure love this boy, I think we'll keep him!