Twelve-month milestones

I forgot to mention in the last posting that William had his official twelve-month doctor's appointment on Friday. He's coming along just fine. He weights 23 pounds and 12.6 ounces and is 75.5 cm long. He's tracking along the growth curve around the 50 or 60th percentile, which is just about where he's been the whole time. We put off the vaccinations until next week, when his rash will have faded.

Dr. Perkins asked about certain milestones. So I thought I'd catalogue some of the things that William's doing these days here, since they're fresh in my mind.

William's words. These are the words that we recognize as meaning a certain thing, words that he uses over and over again. Cat. Duck. Ball. Dada. Bye-bye. David swears that William also says a version of the word Light, and I really think he's starting to say Up, too. He also babbles other words that we don't understand, which the experts call jargon. He's doing really well on his spoken language, but his receptive language skills are even better than his communicative language skills. For example, last night I asked him to go find his school bus toy, and he crawled off and selected the Fisher Price Little People school bus from a big tangle of toys on the floor. He actually recognized the words "school bus." He also knows words like "water," "milk," "Cheerios," "cheese," and "banana." Hmm, notice how those are all food words. That's par for the course, I think; food is Very Important to William. Especially bananas. Uh oh. I just thought of something. Am I going to have to start spelling certain words when I don't want William to know what I'm talking about? Am I going to be in big trouble if he learns to spell at a really young age, like I did?

William's fine motor skills. William has a good pincer grasp. He can pick up small objects like Cheerios with no problem. He's particularly good at dropping Cheerios off his high chair and picking things up and throwing them across the room, thereby making a big mess. Dr. Perkins asked me if he could scribble yet. At first I looked at her like she had grown a second head because if I gave William a crayon, he'd eat it, not draw with it. But then she handed William her pen and showed him how to draw circles on the paper on the exam table. And believe it or not, he actually tried to do just that. So hey, I was surprised, too. I guess I should put down some big sheets of newsprint and get out the crayons and see what he can do. He's receptive to drinking from an open cup, so we're working on that now, too. I still give him a leak-proof sippy cup, but I let him drink out of a regular cup sometimes for practice. Needless to say, I hold onto the cup when we do that.

Standing and walking. William's not walking yet, but he pulls up to standing on everything. And he is cruising. In fact, just in the last week or two, his confidence has improved, so his cruising is becoming more adventurous. Sometime he still drops to his knees to crawl because it's faster for him to get around that way, but it's common now for him to quickly walk the entire length of the coffee table, holding on to the side. This morning, he even took some gleeful, tentative steps while holding onto his little walker-pushcart things. His legs were kind of stiff, and David hovered over him in case his feet got out from under him, but still, it was progress.

William is really turning into a toddler. I bought a copy of What to Expect: The Toddler Years and read the chapter for the thirteenth month last night. It really captured all of the things that William is doing right now, like throwing food off the high chair to see what Mommy will do and all that fun stuff. He's not a baby anymore! But he's still a sweet little boy. He gives hugs and kisses, and no matter how many Cheerios I've picked up off the floor, a quick snuggle and a gummy slobbery kis from William makes it all worthwhile.