Month 17 - "level up! you gain a new feat: Comprehend Language"
We find ourselves having to mentally change gears recently, from thinking about Hamish as a baby to thinking about Hamish as a toddler. Its not just that he's, er, toddling, but he's changed gear again as he starts to understand some of what we say. He can understand various facial features (don't say 'eye' near him unless you want to be poked in the eye) and grabs the right part. 'Gone' leads to a very cute empty handed shrug. 'Bye' results in waving goodbye. 'Pram' gets him climbing into it, and 'outside' makes him pry desperately at the front door. He occasionally repeats some of the words even, 'beep' being his favourite one at the moment - everything with a button or horn... or anything that can be pressed really, makes a beep sound according to him. Hamish will demand to be carried around while he points at stuff and says "this?" and we tell him what it is. The pointing is a little inaccurate, so sometimes he gets the wrong answer and looks confused. Additionally, his neural net still requires processing - 'Hot' for instance, makes him blow his fingers, even if we're talking about the weather. 'Tea' can end with him pointing at his teeth, making it look like he would like a cuppa.
'Book' is another popular word, and almost always results in him grabbing the nearest boardbook and demanding that you read it, or at least flick through the pages. You might not think it, but an 8 page book about sea creatures can start to pale a bit after the 13th read. Especially when the scansion is all wrong. Popular books include a masks book with eyeholes so you can hold them up and be various animals, a colours book where you can mix and match baby faces, block and sock colours, a touch-and-feel book with shiny fish and furry cats, and the hungriest caterpillar. It is not always necessary to read the books forward, at which point the last book becomes a sad story about an anorexic caterpillar who gives up a wide variety of foods, until they waste away. goldengrove has taken him to storytime at the local library a few times, and that was pretty popular. Books with real pages are still a bit beyond him as he gets more value out of crumpling them up and often tearing them out than looking at the pictures, but we have a library of books for when that changes.
Although the duplo-headbutting stitches came out last Friday with hardly any fuss at all, he is still a mass of bumps, bruises and dents. His shins always have a bruise or two, and often his head too. He gets ahead of himself with the walking or running and just ploughs straight into the ground headfirst. I know this is pretty much par for the course, but most of the people that I've interacted with in the last 20 years are a little less physical than Hamish is, so its something that I notice.
There have been other behavioural developments randomly through the month - he will occasionally demand to be picked up and then give you a hug, along with patting you on the back. awwwww. Some behaviour has been kind of random - just after new years he started walking backwards around the house (Homer Simpson in shock style (@ 6mins)). I think he saw someone jogging backward around the nearby oval, and just started copying them. As you'd expect, he walks into stuff and falls down a lot, but he has such an awesome expression up to that point that we don't feel like we should stop him. He's also started pushing us around the house - not in a mean way, just a gentle pressure to go the way he wants us to go. He pushed me up to the bench and then demanded to be lifted up so he could see what was up there and he pushed goldengrove up to his highchair one day because he was hungry.
Food remains a bit of a pain. He can't really feed himself with a spoon yet, although there is some progress along those lines - by which I mean he will steal the spoon and swirl food about, then shake the spoon to redecorate the surrounding area. A shorter spoon seems to have helped that, and one spoon for him and one for whoever is feeding him. He has issues with foods with lumps in it. Finger food is ok, although what he will eat varies, but anything that is sort of puree has to be completely pureed or he spits out the lumps, and the mouthful of goo with them.
Complicating food has been a lack of interest in eating due to teething. His incisors are coming through, filling the gap between molars and front teeth, and it has meant that there was about 4 days where he would demand food, eat 3 spoonfuls and then push your hand away and try and wriggle down. He was still getting plenty of milk and liquids, and running around as active as ever but it began to get a bit concerning about how little food he was having until it broke. He's also gone back to chewing things, a habit that seemed to have faded a bit - he's eaten the spine of books, bit the swings at the playground and munched on his own hands - anything other that chew on a teething ring.
Its been a real back to basics month, because sleep has been a bit strange as well - he seems to be alternating between one and two naps a day. You might think that this is normal as he gets older, but in fact its part of his cunning scheme to sleep through any event that goldengrove organises. Mum's group, storytime at the library, lunch with me at uni, he can be sleep through any of it. He even fell asleep while I was taking him out to Emerald Lake Park one Sunday morning. goldengrove was heard to say she spends half of her life trying to get him to sleep, and the other half waiting for him to wake up. He's slept through a couple of nights this week, which is a nice habit for him to get into.
Other things that happened to Hamish during the month include a few beach trips, Arcanacon, going to Grant's Picnic ground, a mum's group meating at Jells Park where he got to ride in a kid's bike seat, staying at his grandmother's overnight on his own, numerous playground visits and general chaos and madness.
Daguerotypes of a most fascating nature