How did Liam get to be fifteen months old? Well, I know how he got here literally — it’s called time, and it has this interesting aging effect — but figuratively, there’s been such a stunning amount of growth and development that it seems as if it can’t possibly fit into a year and a quarter.
He’s walking everywhere. He’s even working on running. He stands for ages, just looking around. The only time Liam crawls is if he’s already on the floor and what he wants is a couple of feet away. He really needs to work on the getting up on his feet from sitting, though; at the moment he pulls himself up on pant legs, tables, chairs, cupboards, or whatever’s close. He’s awesome at bending down to pick things up, though, and crouching down and then getting back up.
Liam doesn’t shut up. He’s got lots to say, and he says it. Then again, there are times when you’d expect him to babble on and he’s completely silent, not that it usually lasts long. It’s funny to hear him babble away and to recognise a word here and there — blah blah blah blah cat blah blah car blah blah blah Mama blah blah blah blah duck. Blah? Hat. Blah blah book blah. It really makes you wonder what he thinks he’s saying, because he’s got a whole range of facial expressions to go along with the conversation.
Rice Krispies and milk are now his favourite breakfast. He likes to pick up the bowl, tip it towards him, and drink the milk at the end. Sometimes he tries to do this mid-bowl, and ends up with Rice Krispies all over his face. He finds this amusing. He’s tried to do this once or twice with a plate of dinner and ended up with macaroni and cheese all over his lap, which is not as amusing. There are days when he picks all the broccoli out of his dinner to eat it first, and days where he picks it out to lay it carefully on his tray so that he can eat the rest of his dinner without it. Tomorrow, we try raisins as snacks. Raisin Bran didn’t go over so well for breakfast, but if he likes raisins alone he may be okay with the cereal dry as a snack with extra raisins mixed in. Some days he eats like a small horse, other days he has a couple of bites of each meal and is done. He’s definitely developed the toddler appetite.
He has learned how to splash correctly in the bath. Correctly is, of course, with open hands in order to create as much of a water spray as possible. He giggles like a loon while he does it. Liam giggles like a loon at lot of the time, actually. It seems to be his default sound. It’s a riot to see him wander down the hall, a little wooden car in each hand, elbows bent so the cars are up around shoulder level, as he goes “heh heh, heh heh heh, heh heh heh heh”. Actually, he has two default sounds: the loony giggle and the “vvvvvvvvvv” sound that he uses when he pushes cars or trains around, which is a lot of the time. He makes his car sound even if he’s just wandering around with a car in his hand. He loves his wooden cars and engines, loves them to bits; he holds them up for me to kiss them sometimes, and he holds them in the palm of his hand and strokes them gently. He also loves his Little People fire truck and school bus. He lifts them up on to the chesterfield so that he can play with them next to people sitting there. And he gets so excited about books. He brings them to everyone, partly to show them, partly so they can be happy too, partly so they can turn pages and “read” it to him, although he can do that perfectly well on his own and will go ahead and do it if you take too long. One of the best ideas we ever had for the car trip was to bring books with us.
Liam is developing an appreciation for the ludicrous. If you put a basket upside-down on your head like a hat and look at him, he’ll look back at you with a half-smile to see if you’re serious. Then he’ll chortle and chortle, because hey, you’re sitting there with a basket on your head, and it’s silly, because that’s not where baskets go. Lately he’s started doing ludicrous things to see what our reaction is, like holding a sippy cup on top of his own head, or putting one of his engines in a snack dish of Cheerios. He’ll watch to see if we look, and then he’ll laugh that loony laugh, because it’s silly. And then we laugh too, because that loony giggle is so infectious.
He’s learned to stand on toys to be taller and touch things just out of reach. And he can climb up on to the chesterfield if he gets the angle just right, without a toy to give him a step up. We got him a little table and chairs, and they’re a bit big for him yet. But he knows the table is his play table, and he drives his cars on it. His toys are in baskets under it. He threw the chairs around a bit, so we put them away. They hurt when he knocked them over onto our feet, so we could just imagine what they felt like when he dropped them on his own. Plus they were rather loud when they tipped over.
Twelve teeth. Twelve. He likes to brush them. Or, more accurately, he likes to chew on the brush because it feels funny. He wears size 18-24 months, fits 2x tops, around size 4.5 shoes, and can put his arms into the sleeves of his cardigan if you hold it for him.
When we’re out shopping Liam will point over our shoulders and say “car”, and we’ll reflexively start telling him that there’s no car there before one of us takes a closer look and sees a wheel embroidered on the corner of a towel, a picture of a racing car on a poster across the store, a motorcycle on someone’s t-shirt. We’re learning to see things from his point of view, and not to make assumptions about our surroundings. Everything is new, everything is exciting. Liam is so intense. He throws himself into life with such enthusiasm that it’s no wonder he gets cranky if he hasn’t napped enough. He’s such a terrific kid.
Liam ran seven or eight steps on Wednesday. Twice. All on his own. Watching other kids walk around at daycare has really spurred him forward into the whole use of legs alone as mobility enablers. He later proceeded to climb the six or so front porch steps by himself quite handily when I went to pick him up that day. I’ve only ever seen him climb one stair before, but that’s because we don’t have a staircase he can climb on at home. He loves daycare, loves the kids and his caregiver, loves the cats and small fuzzy creatures in cages, loves the turtle. He sleeps well, eats well, plays well. He’s a great kid.
He had macaroni and cheese for the first time that night: the real thing, with homemade cheese sauce. He seemed to like it. He especially likes using a fork to eat it. The fork is my secret weapon: if he decides he’s bored with dinner, I bring out a fork — sometimes the little silver fork I used as a child, sometimes a Grown-Up Fork, sometimes his plastic one — and stab some of the food onto it. He’ll take the fork and place the food in his mouth, gently close his teeth around it, and delicately slip the fork out of his mouth leaving the food on his tongue. Great fun. He tries to stab food on the fork by himself, but he just manages to rub food into the tray or plate. Same with spoons; he knows what’s supposed to happen, he just can’t turn his wrist enough to scoop it into the bowl properly. I usually end up tipping the bowl to make the food fall over the spoon so that he can feed himself that way. Otherwise, I load the utensil and he takes it from me to deliver it to his mouth.
Other new foods? Well, he eats everything now; we’re no longer worried about new things. Digestive cookies are a big hit, as are the Italian biscuit animal cookies his Nana found for him. Anything we eat is fair game. He even seemed to like tea when he managed to get at my teacup the other day, although that’s not going to be a regular thing. He seems to prefer vegetables to fruit, which is mildly puzzling but I’m not going to argue.
Books are still awesome. We keep his books in two places: on a shelf in the living room, and in a bin in his bedroom. He’ll go into his bedroom, pull the bin over, and spend a good twenty minutes reading his books to himself. If he brings a book to you, or points to one for you read to him, it turns into a Choose Your Own Adventure sort of deal, because three pages into the first book he’ll suddenly grab another one and open it randomly; we’ll read another couple of pages, and then there will be a third book brought into the equation. So on some days the great green room goes fishing because you are my little bunny, that’s good hopping thought Little Nutbrown Hare. It hurts my brain sometimes, but then, I hate not finishing books.
He’s still coming up with little games, and it’s fun to figure out what he wants me to do when I play with him. The other day he repeatedly held out one of his two little toy engines from the Thomas the Tank Engine series, somewhere around the base of my throat, so I took whatever one he was showing me and drove it around for a while, then handed it back to him. Then he’d hold out the other one with a giggle and watch closely while I drove that one around. It took me a while before I figured out that he was trying to make the engine drive up my arms the way we do to him, up the arms and over the legs and down the back, making train noises. He makes car noises as he pushes his little wooden cars around too. Very entertaining.
He’s doing really well with being put down drowsy but awake for a nap or at night. He cuddles his Magic Rabbit, now known as Presto, in a full-body hug, and sometimes sings to himself after we leave the room. He doesn’t have a fit often about being left (unless he’s not drowsy enough), or cry himself to sleep; he talks to himself and his rabbit and five or ten minutes later we realise that the noise has stopped, and he’s out for the next twelve hours. He takes two naps, one mid-morning for about ninety minutes, one mid-afternoon for an hour. Nursing is now rare, because he needs the milk he gets before naps and such as part of his daily intake. Sometimes he asks to nurse if he’s upset about something, or if he wants to snuggle for a couple of minutes, and I’m fine with that.
We’re up to ten teeth. We’re expecting the lower first-year molars to begin making their presence known very soon. He’s wearing size 2 shirts, and 18-24 mos pants. I think I have to go get him bigger sandals, because the size fours are snug. I’m having trouble reconciling these facts with the knowledge that if he’d been born on schedule, he’d be one year old today.
