Get current month posts in WordPress loop

I have my loop, which unfortunately only captures all posts PRIOR to the current month. And so I end up with posts in the current month (April 2015) that aren’t showing.

How do I get the loop to include the current month posts as well?
My code:

<?php function the_archive () {
    global $wpdb;
    $limit = 0;
    $year_prev = null;
    $months = $wpdb->get_results("SELECT DISTINCT MONTH( post_date ) AS month , YEAR( post_date ) AS year, COUNT( id ) as post_count FROM $wpdb->posts WHERE post_status = 'publish' and post_date <= now( ) and post_type = 'post' GROUP BY month , year ORDER BY post_date DESC");

    foreach($months as $month) :
        $year_current = $month->year;

        if ($year_current != $year_prev) {
            if ($year_prev != null) {} ?>

            <li class="archive-year">
                <a href="<?php bloginfo('url') ?>/<?php echo $month->year; ?>/">
                    <?php echo $month->year; ?>
                </a>
            </li>

        <?php } ?>

        <li class="archive-month">
            <a href="<?php bloginfo('url') ?>/<?php echo $month->year; ?>/<?php echo date("m", mktime(0, 0, 0, $month->month, 1, $month->year)) ?>/">
                <?php echo date_i18n("F", mktime(0, 0, 0, $month->month, 1, $month->year)) ?>
            </a>
        </li>

        <?php $year_prev = $year_current;
        if(++$limit >= 18) { break; }

    endforeach; 
}
add_shortcode( 'show_archive' , 'the_archive' );
?>

The above outputs a menu to navigate archive posts – see: http://imgur.com/C4WIiKR & http://codeandco.net/news/

So I’m expecting to see a menu item for APRIL, but I do not.
Any ideas?
(thanks in advance 🙂