One Year!The time has come: we've now gone through an entire year with Abigail and she's changed from a roly-poly red dumpling to a busy little girl ready to walk on her own feet.
It's funny how it seems like she was just born and yet last year seems a very long time ago. For one thing, our lively little new baby makes it tough for me to believe that Abigail was in the same spot only a year ago! Things have changed a lot when it comes to Abigail's personality over the past month. She is considerably more interactive, meaning she'll do things with me rather than wanting me to just keep her busy - one of her very favorite things to do is fold laundry with me, since she hands me the clean clothes piece by piece and I fold them. She used to just unload the basket randomly onto the floor without seeming to notice that I was folding them, but now she wants to help. It took a few days to teach the idea of handing things to me at the speed I could fold, but it was worth it. |
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January was a very quiet month, since we had a lot of ice and snow and mostly just stayed indoors and kept up with what was going on with everyone by phone. Abigail now tries to talk on the telephone but has a habit of managing to push buttons that execute commands I never heard of and usually hangs up on whoever she's talking to. She does similar things with the buttons on Grandma's piano and has learned to change the sounds from regular piano to organ, which is apparently her favorite. Her newfound ability to push buttons has made her a little more tricky to keep places she used to be perfectly safe, like by a keyboard (she hasn't quite mastered a mouse yet) or near the thermostat and radio controls in the car. She also spends a lot of time pointing now, especially pointing and saying, "that? That?" at everything in the room.
She began standing alone somewhere around the middle of January - I first noticed her stand up from the floor right after her bath, which has become a definite nightly ritual. She likes to get out of the water, get dried off in about five seconds, ditch the towel and crawl around the bathroom playing with things before getting dressed. One Thursday night she just decided it would be a good idea to stand up and she did. After that, she stood a lot and I kept waiting to see her take some steps, but it wasn't actually until the afternoon of her birthday that she took three steps. And they were her last three steps alone for a while since everyone came over to visit that evening and she found to her delight that she could get people to hold her hands and walk wherever she wanted. She walked so much that evening I think her legs got tired and she hasn't walked anymore since even though I know she can. Maybe in the next few weeks she'll decide walking would be a good idea permanently, but we'll see. I thought when she first crawled that she'd be all over the house the next day but it really took about six weeks before she was crawling all around, so she might do the same with walking.
Her ability to speak is progressing steadily and she communicates more all the time. This month she learned "Lila" and often tells me Grandma is coming out of her room in the morning by pointing and bouncing on her knees while saying, "Wa-wa! Wa-wa!" I encouraged this by playing the Bert and Ernie "L Song" over and over for her since she seems to like to sing along with things. She now asks to hear it by singing "wa wa wa" and points at the computer. We'll take the "w" for "l" sound found the moment but hopefully she won't be doing that too long.
Abigail hardly nurses at all now and is learning how to feed herself, which is a predictably messy process. She is very fond of oatmeal but somehow manages to get it everywhere beside her mouth when she's eating. We keep persevering, though, because she eats enough that it's tough for me to eat a meal and feed her at the same time since the bites don't come fast enough in her opinion and I spend a lot of time telling her to be patient while I eat a bite. She tends to want to eat a series of small snacks rather than actual meals, which is keeping me busy trying to figure out what to feed her that's decently nutritious and which she'll eat instead of playing with (we spend a lot of time discussing "don't throw food on the floor!" and other civilizing concepts). I keep wondering if I'm not feeding her enough and she's losing weight, but the truth is her weight is staying the same (18.6 pounds) and she's stretching longer by the day, so all her fat rolls are disappearing. Her arms and legs are still a bit round, but the hilarious number of rolls she had as an infant have vanished.
I'm looking forward to the next year with Abigail, since this is really the time she's going to blossom into the person I'm going to know the rest of my life. I always enjoy the newborns - and I'm looking forward to the one we expect to meet this summer - but babies only get better from there because they become the people who add so much to my life. Abigail is still very much a baby in that her own unique personality is hard to distinguish beyond the things that pretty much all one-year-olds do, but that's beginning to change and will become much more marked over the days and weeks to come. So...let's see who you are, Abigail!
She began standing alone somewhere around the middle of January - I first noticed her stand up from the floor right after her bath, which has become a definite nightly ritual. She likes to get out of the water, get dried off in about five seconds, ditch the towel and crawl around the bathroom playing with things before getting dressed. One Thursday night she just decided it would be a good idea to stand up and she did. After that, she stood a lot and I kept waiting to see her take some steps, but it wasn't actually until the afternoon of her birthday that she took three steps. And they were her last three steps alone for a while since everyone came over to visit that evening and she found to her delight that she could get people to hold her hands and walk wherever she wanted. She walked so much that evening I think her legs got tired and she hasn't walked anymore since even though I know she can. Maybe in the next few weeks she'll decide walking would be a good idea permanently, but we'll see. I thought when she first crawled that she'd be all over the house the next day but it really took about six weeks before she was crawling all around, so she might do the same with walking.
Her ability to speak is progressing steadily and she communicates more all the time. This month she learned "Lila" and often tells me Grandma is coming out of her room in the morning by pointing and bouncing on her knees while saying, "Wa-wa! Wa-wa!" I encouraged this by playing the Bert and Ernie "L Song" over and over for her since she seems to like to sing along with things. She now asks to hear it by singing "wa wa wa" and points at the computer. We'll take the "w" for "l" sound found the moment but hopefully she won't be doing that too long.
Abigail hardly nurses at all now and is learning how to feed herself, which is a predictably messy process. She is very fond of oatmeal but somehow manages to get it everywhere beside her mouth when she's eating. We keep persevering, though, because she eats enough that it's tough for me to eat a meal and feed her at the same time since the bites don't come fast enough in her opinion and I spend a lot of time telling her to be patient while I eat a bite. She tends to want to eat a series of small snacks rather than actual meals, which is keeping me busy trying to figure out what to feed her that's decently nutritious and which she'll eat instead of playing with (we spend a lot of time discussing "don't throw food on the floor!" and other civilizing concepts). I keep wondering if I'm not feeding her enough and she's losing weight, but the truth is her weight is staying the same (18.6 pounds) and she's stretching longer by the day, so all her fat rolls are disappearing. Her arms and legs are still a bit round, but the hilarious number of rolls she had as an infant have vanished.
I'm looking forward to the next year with Abigail, since this is really the time she's going to blossom into the person I'm going to know the rest of my life. I always enjoy the newborns - and I'm looking forward to the one we expect to meet this summer - but babies only get better from there because they become the people who add so much to my life. Abigail is still very much a baby in that her own unique personality is hard to distinguish beyond the things that pretty much all one-year-olds do, but that's beginning to change and will become much more marked over the days and weeks to come. So...let's see who you are, Abigail!