Ant diary: Thirteen months

Growth check: At his one year appointment, Ant was 31 inches (so my home measurement of 30.75 was pretty good!), and 21lbs 6oz. So a bit heavier than I had thought. He's stepped on the scale the last couple of days and come in at 22.5lb (with clothes on), so think he's still putting on about half a pound a month, which is about right.

Talking: I am absolutely amazed at the rate at which Ant is picking up words. He is definitely well on the precocious side with his verbalization skills! He added somewhere around 30 words this past month. On top of the 16 from the previous month - only high-chair and night-night didn't make much of a reappearance from those first 16. This months words were: balloon, cat (tat), cheese, camera (cac), cake, cord (caw), cup, cute, choo-choo, down, Donald Duck (Don Da), dirty, duck, eyes, Elmo, fish (hish), Freckles (hoc), gone, help, hop, hair, keys, more (mowah), Nicole (cole), off, prunes, shoes, squash, towel, and toast. Freckles is a little bear that came with a bedtime book, you feed Freckles his milk, take off his clothes, bath him, brush his teeth, put on pajamas, read a night time story and then put him to bed. I have *no* idea how one gets "Hoc" from Freckles, but that is clearly what Ant calls him. There are also abou t another 20 words that we heard but weren't sure of. He's clearly enamoured of words that begin with "c", he has twice as many of those as the next closest letters, which are H and D. We're starting to notice a few letter substitutions, but mostly he just skips the letters he can't say. One other thing I thought was funny - he doesn't really do the sign for milk anymore, so I was asking him the other day to say "milk". He kept saying "cup" (which is now how he asks for his milk at night). Me: say 'milk' Ant: cup Me: 'milk' Ant: cup... about three more times :-)

Movement: This month Ant figured out how to get up to standing from sitting in the middle of the floor. He also learned how to kick things this past weekend; spent a good long time kicking his stackable cups up and down the hallway. He really likes it when we "hop" while holding him. Giggles galore. He's also starting to learn how to get off a bed or chair - backwards and feet down. Still not good enough that we'd let him do it on his own, but he's starting to get the hang of turning around, and doing it without our prompting him.

Mental: Ant started balancing things on other things this month; his cup of juice on top of a bowl, his monitor on top of an old hard drive inside its case that Mark has up in the office. His understanding of concepts is phenomenal. He knows what it means when he asks for "help", and will do that when he's unable to do something like getting the lid off a container - or getting his gymini out from behind the couch which he's asked for a few times this month. Points at it and says "help". He also clearly grasps the concepts of hot and cold, particularly hot. There have been a number of occasions when he's put his hand on something and said "hot" - I'll say "I don't think XYZ is hot" - but I touch it, and sure enough, he's right! The other thing he's often right about is he'll look out the back sliding door and say "tat" (i.e. cat), there have been times when I haven't been able to see the animal, but if I look hard enough, one of them i s out there. Although more recently he's been saying it when he wants to go and find the cat too. He knows that his stuffed rabbit "hops", and also said "hop hop hop" to Mark while bringing him his Peter Cottontail book, where Peter hops down the bunny trail, hippity hop.

Toys and games: Taking items out of containers was this month's amusement. Clothes out of the drawer, cupboard, or laundry basket, pots out of the cabinet, toys out of the basket, pens out of the container I keep them in in the office... He enjoys pushing buttons on everything from his new fire truck to the TV to my cell phone.

Teeth: Well, after 4.5 months of no new teeth (longest since he was born), Ant cut five teeth in the last two weeks! His bottom left molar was felt by Ann (Mark's mom) on 9/13, I noticed the top and bottom on the right on 9/23, and then to my complete astonishment when I was at Kate's on Friday I saw that the top right eye tooth was through, with the top left close behind. That is also definitely through now, so I'm going to call that 9/30, although these are all plus/minus a few days. He has been surprisingly sanguine through the pain of getting FIVE teeth at once - definitely more emotionally fragile than usual, but otherwise not much difference. Sleeping and eating just fine. Thank goodness!!! (And yes, I DO know how lucky we are!!!)

Feeding: We switched over to whole milk pretty quickly. I gave Ant an ounce about a week before he turned one, and he threw up three times that day. So I was a little leery. But at his birthday party, he apparently drank 3oz of Sami's milk and was just fine, so I figured it was something else that caused the spitting up the previous time. So we switched completely to whole milk over the next week or so, using up the last of the formula in the process. He's also drinking totally out of a sippy cup except for his bedtime bottle, which I anticipate transitioning to a sippy cup very shortly. He really doesn't seem to mind the cups, so we might as well get rid of the bottle sooner than later.

Sleeping: Still about the same routine - bedtime around 7:15-7:30, am wakeup at 5:45-6 (although he'll usually doze / be happy in his crib by himself until about 6:45), two naps of either 40 min or 1h20min at 9:30 and 2:30. He has had a few days when he's only taken one nap though, and despite my hopes, that's usually not more than an hour long. Hoping he's not going to transition to that just yet, or when he does move to one nap that it gets longer!