Today is Polly’s thirteen month birthday. I thought this would be as good a time as any to take stock of what she’s up to, and her awesome skills. I suddenly note that she has not had her one year check-up, or an appointment for her next inoculations. This is Not Good and wholly indicative of the general level of care we have enjoyed.
ANYWAY. I’m fairly certain that this will only be of interest to me and to close family, so feel free to skip past it if you wish!
Polly is walking. She’s walking really well. She took her first three steps the day before her first birthday, but then couldn’t be bothered doing any more for over a week. She’s now walking by choice whenever she can. She still looks slightly like a comedy zombie though, and does several heavy bumps onto her bum every day. If you hold her hand she’ll walk with you. I love doing this out and about, but she’s so short that you have to lean over to do it.
She talks SO WELL. When she’s feeling a little shy, she won’t talk so much, but it doesn’t take her long to warm up. My absolute favourite is when we meet someone, she’ll say “Hiya!” and then point at me, saying “My mummy.” Bless her. Not sure why she feels the need to point me out to everyone, but I do find it adorable.
She mixes talking with signing, which I have talked about before and absolutely will do again. Some words she pairs with a sign. Some words she doesn’t have a sign for. Some signs don’t have words. My favourite at the moment is lights on/off – with all the Christmas lights around at the moment, she does a lovely “flashing light” sign, just signing on/off again and again and again.
This is intended to be a tally of her spoken words:
hiya, mummy, lego, daddy, bath, bear, baby, balloon, hat, window, door, bubbles, bump, “baa” for a sheep, “rumpeta” for an elephant, “trit trot” for a horse, boots (17)
and signs:
milk, bear, baby, bird, lights on/off, wave hello/goodbye, music, mouse, monkey, ouch/pain, brush teeth, hat, spider, drink, food, bubbles, all gone, more, stop, again (22)
She also makes sounds which aren’t really words or signs. Like “eeeeow” for a cat, “raaargh!” for a lion, crocodile, dragon, tiger etc., “ffffff” for a candle, panting for a dog, sniffing for a pig. (5)
All these, added to pointing and her generally expressive face, mean she has a pretty cool communication repertoire. I am so glad, because it must be frustrating getting your desires across sometimes. Especially since sometimes all she wants is to look for some birds in the garden, or see the flashing lights on the house over the road. How would she communicate that otherwise?
She’s getting really good with small objects too, she takes the hats and hair off little lego minifigures, and puts them back on again. She now very rarely puts them in her mouth, but you can tell that she really wants to a lot of the time. My favourite though is watching her eat. I love seeing her pick up something small like a raisin or a little piece of chicken, and put it in her mouth.
Eating. She’s not had much of an appetite recently, but she’s good at feeding herself. This is lucky because she absolutely will not entertain any attempts to spoon feed her. She’ll shovel the food in herself thank you very much! I think her favourite foods are steak, chicken, chips and bread, though she also particularly enjoys olives, raisins and chocolate biscuits. She’s getting a little fussier these days – once upon a time she’d eat anything, but now she spits out raw tomato and salad leaves. I’ll keep trying though.
She still likes Charlie and Lola, and her face lights up when she hears the theme tune.
She went through a baby obsessive faze, and amassed several dolls. She still plays with them but I don’t think she’s quite as fixated as she was even a couple of weeks ago. Mind you maybe that’s because she’s ill! She loves playing with her lego house and all the animals. She likes making music with her keyboard, xylophone and jingly bells, and her stacking cups can occupy her for ages.
She loves books, and her favourites rotate. For a long time it was a Lego Duplo book called Family, then This Little Baby which came free from BookStart. At the moment it’s the Baby’s Catalogue, but she also spends a lot of time looking at her two signing books which are full of pictures of babies signing words. She uses your finger to point at things of interest in the pictures, so you can tell her what it is. She reads all her books though, and plays with all of her toys. She doesn’t seem to leave anything out, bless her.
I can’t think of anything else. Oh, she usually wakes up about 9am. I love this! She will also usually have a nap at lunchtime, sometimes two hours long. I like it when she also has an afternoon nap somewhere between five and six, but too often recently she’s not bothered.
She has nine teeth, soon to be more!
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