This may seem minor and hardly worthy of mention much less reading, but I actually chased my daughter — the little creature that merely 1 year ago was incapable of anything more voluntary than perhaps an eyeblink — around the house. It was a game to her, which presupposes many, many things… that she wants to have fun, that she understands that a big, bald guy is coming after her and hence she better beat feet, and that she has the (newfound) capacity to escape. I tell you, seeing that little face light up every time she turned around to see me coming closer was just awesome in the strictest sense of the word. I’m playing with my daughter! She squeeled every time she saw me and bang, right back down on all fours and high-tailing it across the room until the next peek back to see if baldie is closing in. Very fun.
We’re no longer concerned about developmental strides like we were at her 1 year checkup a month ago. She was an odd duck at 1 year, though. Had never sat herself up, never crawled, couldn’t take a sippy-cup, nada. She cruised between adjacent furniture pieces like nobody’s business, so that was the saving grace. I think if she hadn’t been cruising our doctor would have been a bit more “Now look here…” than she was. She just wasn’t ready. Now we find her sitting up in bed in the mornings sometimes, she crawls around just fine, and we gave her her last bedtime bottle last night — much to our collective despair — since she’s the sippy-cup pro these days. It’s a pretty fun time.
Words are an interesting conundrum. She says words or word-like things. At one point everything in creation was “da-da”. Take her for a walk, pass a mailbox: da-da. Flowers? Da-da. Me? Not da-da, but that’s all right. Now she actually knows that things have names, and she has words for at least one of them: Piglet. Her Piglet plush — all 4 of them, though to her there is one — is her life. We’ve been putting her to bed at night and our routine is now to ask her where Piglet is in French. She’ll start looking around and eventually hold her arm out at the little creature. The other night as I changed her diaper, she held up Piglet, pointed quite deliberately at him and said “Di-di”, accent on first syllable while looking at me. “Yes, sweet pea, that’s Piglet.” She did it again. And again. Repetition is your friend. So she has that whole thing down. I should probably mention that both cats are also “di-di” at this point, but that doesn’t detract from the awesomeness!
That baby Heimlich thing works. Those of you with kids or expecting should go take that baby first aid course. Cat and I each have had to use it on Julia a couple of times as she learns to eat those pesky solid foods. My most recent was a piece of ham. Perfect size and shape to cut off an infant air passage, so that’s what it did. Turned to look at my wide-eyed, panic-stricken daughter sitting stiff and rather red-faced in her high-chair, mouth wide-open, no sound coming out. One lift, lay along the arm, face down, solid smack to the upper back and out flies evil ham chunk. Once my heart started beating again, everything was dandy. Go learn it, it helps.
