19/08/2007

Toddlerdom development update

Asher is learning and growing every day, and it still amazes me. His walking, in the space of a week, has gone from a few tentative steps most days to suddenly wanting to walk everywhere. Almost whenever he wants to go somewhere no he takes off walking and then after 1 or 5 steps he either reaches his goal or falls to the floor and crawls. My friend K said her daughter A used to do the opposite - stand looking at her objective and calculating whether it would be easier and faster to walk or crawl.

His language development has also come along in the last two weeks. He understands quite a lot of what we say. He finds my nose when requested, can generally point to his ball or his truck (and in fact the other day at the park I wanted to pack up and started muttering "where's your green ball Asher" and he pointed it out to me). He has a sign for "more" which he uses whenever he's hungry (he thinks it means "Food! Now!") and requests various songs by using their actions. He's also just taken to using the imperial point and saying "dat!" and I try to name the things he points at for him. I think he's really thrilled about being able to communicate with us.

He's also obsessed by technology - particularly the phone (which he calls 'Gah!' - I thinks it's from me walking into the room saying "Gah! He's got my phone again"). He holds the phone up to his ear and makes a word that liberally interpreted could be understood as hello. He will also feel around on the table above his head to find the computer mouse and the other day he pushed his little chair over to the table to get at both my phone and the mouse. It was so cute I had to photograph it:


Now he's awake, so I have to turn the moniter off before Sanjay gets him out of bed (he's pretty much transitioned to one sleep per day) but despite how relentless his little demands are, I just love him!

14/08/2007

Welcome toddlerdom

Well, the little dude has just started walking. He took his first few steps on Thursday afternoon and then walked several times on the weekend, including once in front of several people, so I know I'm not imagining it. It's very cute, and timely, at 13-and-a-half months although he still crawls faster than almost* any of the other babies can walk.

Apart from that news it's pretty quiet around here, but in that quiet-before-the-storm kind of way. We'll be moving late September which will be the biggest upheaval since Asher arrived in our lives and I'm not looking forward to it. We packed a few boxes of rarely-used kitchen stuff on the weekend just to test the waters and now I'm dreading it more than ever. But once it's all over it will be nice to have a bit more space. Has anyone got any tips for moving house with kids?


* Baby Miles is lovely, and walked at 7.5 months, so has been running quite confidently for quite a while now.