Guinevere with her giant stuffed dog, Eric. |
Guinevere
is 10 months old now! Can you believe
it?! I know I can’t. Her first birthday is only 2 months
away. Now I can start planning that
birthday party for real! (Though,
really, I mostly have it all planned in my head anyway . . . note to self:
pester Aaron to get the back yard in semi-decent order so that people don’t
mind hanging out back there.)
I
know there are a lot of women who miss the newborn stage once their baby
outgrows it. I am not one of them. I’m loving every new stage that Guinevere
enters. And with each new stage, I fall
even more in love with her. I love
watching my baby grow and become more and more aware of the world around
her. I love watching her acquire new
skills every day. Speaking of skills –
even though Guinevere has not mastered crawling forward, she has become quite
accomplished in crawling in a circle and rolling around to get whatever she
needs/wants. She also has learned to use
“tools.” We’ll put a toy just out of her
reach, like all the books say to do, to try to get her to crawl forward towards
it. She’ll look at the toy, reach her
little hands out and try to get it. Once
she realizes she can’t quite reach, she will roll over to another toy (usually
her remote control toy, or the edge of our alphabet mat), grab the toy that she
can reach and then use it to move the toy that was out of her reach closer to
her. The first time she did that, we were
sort of impressed/amazed. Aaron said to
her, “work smarter, not harder.”
Here's a video of G puling out one of her "tools"
Here's a video of G crawling in a circle. This was taken a week or two ago, and she's now much faster at it!
In
addition to (almost) crawling, I think she said her first word today. This morning, she looked right at Aaron and
said, “Daddy.” And then Aaron said,
“yeah?” And she said, “yeah.” She’s been saying “dada” for a while now, but
it never seemed to have any meaning specific to Aaron, it’s just her favorite
consonant sound to make. She’s always
been really good about being able to use a combination of “da” and pointing or
indicating to let us know what she wants/needs.
But this was the first time where (I think) there was real meaning
behind what she was saying. She said,
“Daddy” again tonight at dinner. I think
she also likes our reaction when she says it because, of course, Aaron and I
get super excited, which then makes her excited, which makes all of us excited. So what do you think? Should we count “daddy” as her first
word? Or wait until she says something
else?
Guinevere
is also testing out other new sounds. The
other day, I handed her a stuffed animal tiger that my sister gave us and said
to G, “This is a tiger.” Guinevere said,
“didar” – I swear it sounded like she was trying to say “tiger.” She also says, “ca” when I point out the cat
on a semi-regular basis. Of course,
getting her to repeat anything is an exercise in futility. Immediately after some brilliant
breakthrough, you’ll say “Guinevere, can you say [fill in the blank]?” And she’ll just respond, “dadadada
zerbjeoanuiheret.” She’s also started to
say, “nana” and “wawa” (just the sounds, no meaning attached to them). Still waiting on “mama” . . .