Here’s your biweekly update on the doings of M..
She’s really taken to her walker. She’ll crawl over to it, pull herself up, and if it’s parked against something, <span style=”text-decoration:line-through;”>look for you to come help her turn it around</span>. Since writing that Sunday, she’s learned how to slowly and carefully pivot it until her path is unobstructed. Then, she’s off! She speeds away, laughing and yelling, pleased with herself to no end.
She’s taken her ability to climb the stairs to an uncomfortable level. If you turn you back for two seconds, she’s headed towards the staircase. Fortunately, we never leave her anywhere that’s close enough to the stairs for her to get to them without us knowing. I don’t trust the gates we’ve put up 100%, so I like to be around even when they’re locked.
She’s started to make the mental leap to connecting things together. Up until now, she’s done things that often give the appearance that she’s connecting two events, but developmentally she probably wasn’t quite there yet. As I’ve written about before, she loves to stare at our ceiling fans and lights. When you’re holding her and walk into a new room, she immediately looks up to check out the fixtures. One day last week, for fun, I asked,
“M., where’s the fan?”
She leaned back, looked up, pointed to the ceiling, and laughed. Cracked me up. If I do it in a room where there is no fan, she points and looks, then seems confused when it’s not there. The best example, though, came Friday afternoon. I picked her up at the in-laws and when we got home, she fell asleep on me. I let her nap until about 6:15 then started trying to rouse her so she could eat dinner. I shook her leg gently. I tickled any exposed skin. I talked to her softly. I got no more response than a slightly opened eye and a look that told me, “Daddy, I’m not waking up.” So I stood up and said, “M.. Where’s the fan at?” I swear, her eyes popped open, she raised her hand, smiled at me, and started babbling while pointing at the fan. Genius.
Another area of connecting things concerns her use of our remotes. We’ve tried to give her remotes we don’t use often (generally the VCR remotes) but she always wants the remote that is in your hand. So we’ll land on a channel we want to watch for awhile, remove a battery from it, and give her the cable box remote. Instead of just holding, chewing, and slobbering on it as she used to, now she points it towards the TV and tries to push the buttons. Even better, one day she got ahold of the free battery. After we snapped at her for trying to chew on the battery, she flipped the remote over and tried to put the battery into the place she saw us take it from. My kid is brilliant!
Appropriately, on daddy’s birthday yesterday, M. had her first barbecue: a small piece of very tender chicken from Dick’s Bodacious. Burnt ends in KC in two weeks?
Now Playing: <strong>Test Transmission (Video Edit)</strong> from the album “Kasabian” by <a href=”http://www.google.com/search?q=%22Kasabian%22″>Kasabian</a>