Odds and ends

A recent conversation with the grandparents suggested that we'd forgotten to let people know that Edith is fully bipedal now. A couple of weeks ago she started walking around the apartment one evening and never looked back. She hasn't crawled since.

It's amazing how quickly we've gotten used to this much-anticipated turn of events. I feel like I can hardly remember the time when she held onto furniture for support or dropped and crawled from one place to another. But it was just the beginning of this month. The parent brain is funny that way.

Edith is pleased as punch to be walking. If there's nowhere to go, she circles round and round the apartment. Her appetite seems to have spiked sharply, and Tom and I both agree that her enormous Buddha belly has already shrunk a bit to be more proportionate with the rest of her. Unfortunately the increased exercise doesn't seem to have predisposed her to sleep longer stretches through the night. I'm still up with her every 2 or 3 hours. We have to do some sleep training soon for the sake of my health, but we keep putting it off. At 3am it's hard to stand firm against piteous wails.

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At this past weekend's wedding Edith had her first encounter with authentic Indian food (as opposed to the tikka masala we make out of a jar at home). I was feeding her bits of the more mild dishes off my plate, and she was gobbling them up. Knowing that she has responded favorably to seasonings in the past, I decided to give her a bit of the spicy green bean & eggplant mixture.

As she started to chew, her eyes got big. Her face turned red. Tears welled up in her eyes. But she kept chewing. When she had swallowed, she let out a roar -- a baby version of "Damn, that was HOT!" While we were laughing, she grabbed the arms of the high chair, threw her head back and bellowed again.

Then she sat up, looked at me, and made the sign for more.

She continued to eat the spicy vegetables, roar, and then sign more. Another guest later told us it was his favorite part of the wedding.

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As indicated above, Edith is using some sign lanugage now. For those not hip to current baby culture, there is a trend toward teaching babies some basic ASL signs. It's done in an effort to bridge the fairly long gap between the time when they can start to understand speech and the time when they can speak clearly themsleves. Babies' motor skills develop faster than their control over their vocal chords, so sign language allows them to communicate their thoughts before their voices will let them do so.

We started using some basic signs with Edith around the age of six months, the age at which it's thought they first have enough long-term memory for signing to be of any value. It didn't seem to be having much effect and after five months we'd all but given up on it, figuring she'd talk soon enough and make her wishes known in other ways until then. But suddenly within the last week she has started clearly and deliberately using the signs we've modeled the most frequently: more, milk, eat, and all done. I guess it makes sense that the use of signs came at the same time that she started responding to basic requests and making motions to songs. It's pretty amazing all the same. Especially when she does the signs casually in the middle of playing. She'll be toddling around her room, not looking to communicate with us, and she'll sign eat, as if she's thinking about hunger. If I offer her some food at that point, sure enough, she gobbles it up.

This morning I was asking our houseguest if he wanted milk for his coffee, and when I pulled out the jug, Edith pointed and signed milk. Since we've only used that sign in conjunction with breastfeeding or with baby bottles of expressed milk, I have no idea how she transferred the concept to the gallon container of cow's milk...unless it was simply that she overheard me saying the word.

We're hoping now to add to her vocabulary: we think change [a diaper/clothes], help, and stop might be useful, as well as signs for some of her favorite things.

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Edith loves imitating us in daily routines these days. The silver lining to her ruining the cellphone was that we had a discarded phone she could use. That is, until someone saw it sitting in the carseat of the parked car on Easter morning and evidently thought it was worth taking (bet he was disappointed). Babies seem to like toys that look as close the real thing as possible -- much better a silver regular-sized cellphone than a pink oversized plastic one -- but there's a downside when they fool adults, too.

She also is fascinated by typing, but we don't have any old keyboards we're willing to let her destroy. But we do let her push the grocery cart (boy, does shopping take a long time now), and we let her sweep. Here she is helping Daddy with the mopping:


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Finally, with thanks to Anjani for the caption:

Edith reaches the "why?" stage.