Month 14 seems to be the month of exponential growth and learning for Baby R or should we say Toddler R. It’s almost as if overnight her brain turned on and now, every day she’s doing new tricks!

Here are some cool things she’s been doing that we just want to document & remember.

She can sign eat, wo yao (which is I want in Chinese), and all done.

She’ll bow for thank you— something Cindy does mostly as a joke with her family– but Baby R saw her doing it one day and has been copying ever since!

She can say no and up very distinctly and gou gou (which is dog in Chinese).

She can also say bye bye, bao bao (which means hug in Chinese), da-da, ma-ma, brown bear (although not very clearly), and maybe some other words but we can’t remember them at the moment.

She loves to play hide-and-seek and chase. She loves running around and going outside. A cute quirk she has is that she’ll bring us her shoes to tell us she wants to go to the park.

Some other cute quirks– she loves wearing hats which makes it easy to keep her sun-safe because we don’t have to fight her on keeping her hat on. She also loves wearing her favorite dinosaur jacket even though we’re in the middle of a heat wave. We’ve had to hide her jacket so she doesn’t request it. And she loves carrying purses with her whenever she goes out (maybe because she always sees Cindy with her purse).

It continues to surprise us how much she picks up on and how much she copies us! We keep reminding ourselves we have to really start watching how we talk and behave around her so we can model good habits.

So far, we’re absolutely loving this early toddler stage. It’s been so fun watching her become her own person and seeing her personality forming. It also makes things so much easier to be able to communicate with her and have her communicate back.

As for us, at 14 months we’re finally starting to feel like we can maaaaybe do this again. Just 2 months ago, we could NOT imagine having another baby. It just seemed so insane and impossible. It’s so amazing how much maturing can happen in just 2 months and how much of a difference that can make! We’re still noooot quite ready yet, but it’s reassuring to know that it does get easier.