Last year at this time, I was packing the library/office/dining room in the old apartment, Solitary Wicca for Life had just been listed on the Amazon sites for preorder, and there were 40K words in the green witch manuscript. It’s amazing what changes a year can bring.

The changes that Liam’s undergoing are so extreme sometimes that you can see the difference from one day to the next. He can stand for a few seconds before thumping down on the floor or grabbing a tabletop again. It seems to be a case of simply forgetting to hold onto something until his balance shifts. We don’t have stairs so he hasn’t really had an opportunity to learn how to go up or down them, but he did manage to get himself up the single step in the ADZO sunken playroom the other day.

The language thing proceeds apace. He’s very good at echoing the number of syllables when you say a word to him. A couple of times he’s seen Maggie and said, “Gee-ca”, which I can only assume is his approximation of Maggie-Cat. And I nearly fell off the chesterfield one day when he was watching one of his educational videos: a child’s drawing of a cat came up on the screen, the narrator said “cat”, and Liam said “cat” right back to the TV. He can say “Hi” to people regularly now, and we’re hearing “hi cat” or “hi Da” a lot more, because these are the phrases we say to him. “Look, there’s the cat. Hi cat!” we’ll say, and he’ll say it too.

He eats so well. He loves to feed himself toast and Cheerios and crackers, although he’s not as excited about handling slices of steamed vegetables. My heart nearly burst the day he was munching a rice rusk and held it up against my lips so that I could nibble it too. I did, and he went back to munching it. No big thing, just a casual “Here Mama, you can have some too.” Why is it so moving when a baby shares food? Is it because it’s sustenance, something we couldn’t live without, and so to have someone offer to share it so openly and innocently touches us on some deep instinctive level? He’s held his teething ring out for me to gnaw on too, and he finds it very amusing for some reason when I nibble the plastic rings. Now he tries to feed toast to his stuffed turtle as well as trying to share his toys with it. He’s tried to share toast with Maggie too (of course). And in the car I’ve seen him hold crackers out to his Noah’s Ark dangly toy that hangs from the window. As for nursing, he’s sort of self-weaning: he’s just too busy to settle down and nurse during the day, so apart from the usual bottle in the morning when he wakes up, we give him his milk in a sippy cup during playtime, and a bottle around two or three in the afternoon. He usually has a pre-bedtime nursing session too.

Liam’s currently fascinated with wheels. He hangs out the side of the stroller to watch the wheels go around, and if we’re walking with another child in a stroller or wagon he keeps a close eye on those wheels as well. At the park the ground where we picnic is slightly uneven, so he can usually sit next to the stroller and spin one of the front sets of wheels that aren’t fully touching the ground. The other day we pulled the stroller up to the car, and he reached out to touch the car tire as we unlocked the back door for him. Then he got very upset when we tried to lift him out of the stroller to put him in his car seat. No, he wanted to see the wheel, and as we didn’t have anywhere to be right away we let him feel it all over, the hubcap and the tread of the tire itself, until he was satisfied. Well, mostly satisfied; we didn’t let him chew on it the way he wanted to.

He’s figured out that it’s the cello bow that makes the sound on the strings, so it now interests him just as much as the strings do. He grabs at it when I play, trying to move it over the strings himself to make scratchy noises. We bought him a xylophone/piano thing the other day and he alternates between bashing the xylophone part with his hand (not the piano part yet, for some reason, and not with the mallets provided) and turning it upside down to hit the bottom of it.

We can see his sense of humour developing as he gets older. Liam loves to pretend he’s sneezing. He’ll look at you, grin, and say “ah… ahh.. ahh…”. Sometimes he’ll just wait like that, a mischevous look in his eye, until you finish the sequence by saying “CHOO!” and he laughs and laughs. Other times he’ll just do a sedate little “Ah-choo” of his own, then grin like a fool. Along with the sense of humour is the development of the temper as he futher understands what he wants. For example, if he sees HRH walk through the back door, he’ll crawl over and bang on it to follow. Sometimes he gets very angry if he isn’t allowed to do so, or if we take something away from him that he shouldn’t have, and he lets us know in no uncertain terms. It’s usually remedied by saying, “You can’t play with that, but you can play with this instead” and handing him another toy to replace whatever he wasn’t supposed to be handling.

He loves the park. He loves to swing; the first time I pushed him he began to giggle so hard that he gave himself the hiccups within seconds. Now when we go to the park we swing for a while till he decides he’s done, then we picnic on a blanket and have fruit and water and crackers, and he watches the older kids play with huge eyes and a half-smile.

The no nap/ twenty minute nap/ multiple night wakings have mostly melted away over a period of four days. Now he’s back to sleeping through the night, and he has two glorious hour and a half naps per day, sometimes with a short catnap late in the afternoon. Unfortunately over the past couple of days with this cold, he’s back down to short catnaps instead of long naps (or not napping at all, sigh), but there are four or five of them so the total nap time is equivalent to his two longer naps. And the multiple night wakings haven’t returned (knock on wood). Of course, the cold may be messing the new routine up more permanently than temporarily, so we’ll see how things settle once it’s over.

Today he went for another research observation, this one at the Concordia psych department where they had him watch video sequences of animals moving versus furniture moving, and then watch a robot puppet show where the robot directed its attention to one toy or another repeatedly. So that makes four projects in which he’s participated. I find his development and learning so interesting that talking to people doing research on how infants and toddlers react to information, or how they learn and apply skills fascinates me.

We’re on our last chapter of the first year baby books. In thirty-one days he’ll be a year old. That’s just astonishing. I suppose we’ll have to get to organising a party, yes?

And since he’s eleven months old, the Liam: Ten Months Old photo abum is up! Enjoy it.