Eleven months
Which was actually almost a week ago, but hell, I'm a procrastinator.
At 11 months, Bat Girl is a maniac for walking. Since she is also tiny (18 lbs), nearly bald, and until last week toothless, it's a fairly funny visual, as if an infant suddenly got up and started roaming around. I got her this for Christmas and she loves dragging it all over the apartment. Actually, she loves dragging toys from one room to another in general--as my mom observed, "She's very busy, isn't she?" She wants desperately to walk up and down the steps to our sunken living room, and so while she does crawl up them, she refuses to learn how to back herself down. If you are not right there to hold her hands and help her "step" down, she will dive headfirst right off the top step, as my husband learned the other day.
Language-wise, she is babbling a lot and says "kitty" ("Dit-ty! Dat!"), "baby," "hi," and "bye" fairly reliably. Also, when the cat yowls "rrowr" she likes to imitate it: "Ow!" She's very interested in the names of things and likes to point to things for us to identify. She can now, when prompted, correctly point to the following objects: kitty, light [either light fixture or light switch, and she loves to turn the lights on and off], mirror, picture [any non-mirror framed item on the wall], Christmas tree, and, um, Boba Fett. (Don't ask...) The Christmas tree apparently made such an impression that now that it's gone, she keeps waving "bye-bye" to the corner where it used to sit. She is less interested in saying or identifying Mama or Dada, naturally. I have been trying to teach her to sign "more" and "all done" for mealtimes without much success, but I just noticed that when she wants to move on to the next "course" of her meal (done with soup, time for prunes!) she will wave hello at whatever she wants to eat.
The receptive language is the coolest development, in my opinion. Now, when we say something like, "Bring the book to Mommy," "Turn the page," or "Can you give that to Daddy, please?" she actually does it. This is especially nice when "that" is a wad of cat hair that she has plucked off the carpet and is about to insert in her mouth.
As you might have guessed from the above, she is really into books right now, which warms her bibliophile mother's heart. We've always had storytime before bed, and in recent months we've kept a stack of books in the living room for her to page through while she's playing, but a couple weeks ago she developed a new favorite activity: going into her room, pulling books off the shelves, and selecting a favorite...then holding it out to you with a heart-melting smile, for it to be read to her. And then doing it again, and again, and again...we've each read Miss Spider's Tea Party about three times a day. This made for a rough moment the first day I went back to work after Christmas--when she saw me putting on my shoes, she ran into her room and brought out Miss Spider, holding it up to me in (I think) an attempt to keep me from leaving. When I told her, no, I couldn't read the book, I had to go to work, she freaked out and had to be peeled off me by my husband.
After months of anticipation, her bottom two teeth FINALLY poked through last week. I don't think it's a coincidence that she's also finally starting to make some tiny progress on self-feeding. Up until now, she has not been interested in putting ANYTHING in her mouth, much less food. But right around the time the teeth popped out, she started picking bits of lint and cat hair off the floor and trying to eat them, and now she'll occasionally pick up a bit of shredded cheese or piece of tangerine off her high chair tray and attempt to get it in her mouth, instead of just mushing it around. The other night, she grabbed the spoon from me and dipped it into her mashed avocado and brought it to her mouth. Of course, it was the wrong end of the spoon, but this is progress.
What else...she's interacting with her toys more intricately now. When I make a tower with her stacking cups, instead of just knocking the whole thing over, she delicately removes each cup one by one, then flings them to the floor with a barbaric yawp. She likes to hold a mixing bowl or Tupperware over her face and yowl into it, enjoying the echo chamber effect. She'll now put toys one by one into a box or bag, instead of just dumping them out. (Though I think my husband was a bit ambitious this morning when, in trying to show her how to re-shelve all the CDs she had just dumped onto the floor, he told her, "Now, we do it alphabetically by artist and then chronologically by album.")
In short, she continues to amaze, delight, and entertain. I can't believe she'll be a year old in just a few weeks.
At 11 months, Bat Girl is a maniac for walking. Since she is also tiny (18 lbs), nearly bald, and until last week toothless, it's a fairly funny visual, as if an infant suddenly got up and started roaming around. I got her this for Christmas and she loves dragging it all over the apartment. Actually, she loves dragging toys from one room to another in general--as my mom observed, "She's very busy, isn't she?" She wants desperately to walk up and down the steps to our sunken living room, and so while she does crawl up them, she refuses to learn how to back herself down. If you are not right there to hold her hands and help her "step" down, she will dive headfirst right off the top step, as my husband learned the other day.
Language-wise, she is babbling a lot and says "kitty" ("Dit-ty! Dat!"), "baby," "hi," and "bye" fairly reliably. Also, when the cat yowls "rrowr" she likes to imitate it: "Ow!" She's very interested in the names of things and likes to point to things for us to identify. She can now, when prompted, correctly point to the following objects: kitty, light [either light fixture or light switch, and she loves to turn the lights on and off], mirror, picture [any non-mirror framed item on the wall], Christmas tree, and, um, Boba Fett. (Don't ask...) The Christmas tree apparently made such an impression that now that it's gone, she keeps waving "bye-bye" to the corner where it used to sit. She is less interested in saying or identifying Mama or Dada, naturally. I have been trying to teach her to sign "more" and "all done" for mealtimes without much success, but I just noticed that when she wants to move on to the next "course" of her meal (done with soup, time for prunes!) she will wave hello at whatever she wants to eat.
The receptive language is the coolest development, in my opinion. Now, when we say something like, "Bring the book to Mommy," "Turn the page," or "Can you give that to Daddy, please?" she actually does it. This is especially nice when "that" is a wad of cat hair that she has plucked off the carpet and is about to insert in her mouth.
As you might have guessed from the above, she is really into books right now, which warms her bibliophile mother's heart. We've always had storytime before bed, and in recent months we've kept a stack of books in the living room for her to page through while she's playing, but a couple weeks ago she developed a new favorite activity: going into her room, pulling books off the shelves, and selecting a favorite...then holding it out to you with a heart-melting smile, for it to be read to her. And then doing it again, and again, and again...we've each read Miss Spider's Tea Party about three times a day. This made for a rough moment the first day I went back to work after Christmas--when she saw me putting on my shoes, she ran into her room and brought out Miss Spider, holding it up to me in (I think) an attempt to keep me from leaving. When I told her, no, I couldn't read the book, I had to go to work, she freaked out and had to be peeled off me by my husband.
After months of anticipation, her bottom two teeth FINALLY poked through last week. I don't think it's a coincidence that she's also finally starting to make some tiny progress on self-feeding. Up until now, she has not been interested in putting ANYTHING in her mouth, much less food. But right around the time the teeth popped out, she started picking bits of lint and cat hair off the floor and trying to eat them, and now she'll occasionally pick up a bit of shredded cheese or piece of tangerine off her high chair tray and attempt to get it in her mouth, instead of just mushing it around. The other night, she grabbed the spoon from me and dipped it into her mashed avocado and brought it to her mouth. Of course, it was the wrong end of the spoon, but this is progress.
What else...she's interacting with her toys more intricately now. When I make a tower with her stacking cups, instead of just knocking the whole thing over, she delicately removes each cup one by one, then flings them to the floor with a barbaric yawp. She likes to hold a mixing bowl or Tupperware over her face and yowl into it, enjoying the echo chamber effect. She'll now put toys one by one into a box or bag, instead of just dumping them out. (Though I think my husband was a bit ambitious this morning when, in trying to show her how to re-shelve all the CDs she had just dumped onto the floor, he told her, "Now, we do it alphabetically by artist and then chronologically by album.")
In short, she continues to amaze, delight, and entertain. I can't believe she'll be a year old in just a few weeks.
Labels: Bat Girl
posted by electriclady at 1:52 PM
6 Comments:
Batgirl sounds amazing and SMART!!! It is so much fun watching them learn new things everyday!!
It is such a fun age, isn't it? It sounds like BatGirl is doing wonderfully and is very smart!
she sounds adorable as ever and very accomplished (of course!).
She's such a clever little bug. P is a book fiend, and as much as I naturally love this fact, it's a bit of a pain sometimes. She petitions for "boops" to be read all.the.damn.time. Seriously, I work full-time and must read to this kid 45 minutes a day.
Ah well...I'm sure we'll both be grateful for this in 25 years when they're award-winning novelists.
Dear Electriclady, Bat Girl sounds adorable! I can't believe how advanced she is for 11 months. I love the book fixation (and the image of a walking infant is too funny!).
I've just managed to catch up now and wanted to wish you a belated happy birthday!
What a neat kid you two have. Seriously, she's my hero.
Give her a kiss for me.
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