Life with a one year old

Some tidbits from the past few weeks and more:

Meredith has been enjoying helping to dress herself for a while now.  I kind of wish I’d taken more notice on when it started, not that it matters but I like to write things like that down in her baby book.  Probably before she turned a year, but getting so much more lately.  She will go and find her shoes and then hold them to her feet or hand them to me to help her put them on.  She lifts up her feet one at a time as I put them on.  She will bring me pants too, and will stand and lift her legs one at a time while I slip them on.  She also knows to put her arms through arm holes in shirts.  A couple of weeks ago, I started to put a shirt on her and she cried and pulled at it.  I took it off again, and she went and found a different shirt and handed it to me and quite happily let me put that one on.  She’s already picking out her own clothes!  She is showing some independence here too, as she sometimes doesn’t appreciate our help.  She spent about 20 minutes one morning with a pair of socks, examining them, finding the hole, trying to slip them on her feet.  She almost got one on, and I reached over to slip the last little edge around, and she yanked her foot and the sock away from me and started all over again.  Silly me!

She’s signalling more when she needs to go pee, but still definitely not consistently.  She wears the ecaPants we got around the house mostly now, but I still put her in diapers, or at least a wool cover/longies, when we go out.  However, she has learned a signal for when her diaper is wet, which is patting her hip, and is getting pretty consistent with that.  We just started patting our hips this past week when we asked her if she needed her diaper changed, and she’s caught on really quickly.  She obviously knows when her diaper is wet/dirty, so I’m hoping that will extend to her doing it before she needs to go too.

Speaking of signs, she made up her own sign.  I still haven’t quite figured out what it means.  At first I thought maybe it was her own sign for milk, even though she’s been using the ASL sign for it since she was about 6 months old.  But I think maybe it means “more” now.  Mostly she uses it when she’s nursing or wants to nurse, but she wants to play with the other breast while she’s nursing.  But she did do it once on the swing when I asked her if she wanted to swing some more.  What she does is tap her index finger into the open palm of her other hand.  I feel kind of bad that I don’t know exactly what she means by it, but I may never know.  At least I’m aware she has a sign that means she needs something, and can respond.  I’ve been trying to sign a lot to her.  We have a deaf cousin, so I’d like her to learn sign language at least enough to be able to communicate, since I’m close to my cousins and we see them a few times a year.  I’m trying to get Kris to learn some signs to do with her too, but I know it’s hard to remember to do them.  I think once she catches on, she will probably learn them pretty quickly.

Two signs she has learned in the past couple of weeks that she uses a lot now are shaking her head for no and nodding for yes.  I think though that sometimes she shakes her head no when she means yes still.  But it’s really handy to be able to ask her something and have her tell me for sure yes or no!  I think at first she shook her head (or bobbled it really) because she thought it was funny, but she caught on pretty quick that she could communicate by doing so too. 

She has discovered the park in our complex, and has fallen in love with it.  She will go get shoes/pants and then head to the door and stand waiting patiently (or not so patiently at times ) for us to get our own shoes on and follow her there.  Sometimes we go out the back way, and there is a forest behind our house with tons of blackberry bushes.  As we walk to the park, she wants to stop and pick blackberries.  Lately she doesn’t want us to pick one for her, she wants to do it herself.  She will grab on to one and squeeze as she pulls, which usually results in the berry bursting and purple juice flying everywhere.  I’m not sure any of us own clothes anymore that aren’t stained purple.

Another really cute thing she’s taken to doing lately is sitting on the bottom step.  She will take a sock, or a sippy cup, paper, a toy, really anything she’s semi-interested in, and toddle to the stairs, and plop herself down on the bottom one or the second from bottom.  And then just sit and play.  I think maybe they are the perfect height for her to sit comfortably right now?  I actually set up table and chairs that my mom had bought for her.  They say they’re for three and up, but I don’t listen well.  She can get up on the chairs herself but I think they’re still a little tall, but the chair itself is small enough that she sometimes finds it hard to get herself positioned comfortably.  The stairs are much shorter but there’s lots of room for her to sit.

We bought her crayons for her birthday.  At first they were just yummy food, but she will colour with them now.  She doesn’t have a ton of interest in them yet, but she’ll sit for a few minutes and scribble.  She also loves the little keyboard that used to be my grandfather’s (though she sits on it to play it) and the bigger keyboard that was my uncle’s (which she actually uses with her hands).  She will go to one or the other and point and yell until we turn it on for her.  I’m trying to show her how to do that herself, but she hasn’t quite caught on to the smaller one (it’s a sliding button), and the bigger one she can turn off but can’t quite push hard enough to get it on yet.  We have noticed since she was quite young that she seems very aware of music and seems to enjoy it.  She loves to dance and occasionally even sings a bit.  She seems to actually sing/dance with the beats for the most part too.

Lastly, she is teething big time.  Remember a couple of months ago when I said she’d cut a second tooth?  I lied.  That tooth came through a bit, but then disappeared.  I don’t know if the tooth actually goes backward, or if it stops coming and the gums end up growing back over, or what.  As a biologist (at heart at least), I really can’t quite wrap my brain around why that would happen physiologically, but anyway.  She had one tooth for a long time, then suddenly she has 5 teeth coming in.  That bottom one I thought was through is still coming through, and the four top front teeth.  The two on the sides at the top are the furthest through, with one having already cut through.  I’m thinking this amber teething necklace we got has to be doing something now, because though she’s had some very fussy nights/days, except for one instance none of them have been anything as intense as the first tooth coming through, and that was only one tooth.

Related posts:

1. Life in a nutshell
2. Update