Last Thursday Joseph turned ten months. I can’t decide if that’s long or short and I certainly can’t remember when he suddenly took off learning everything. I made some notes on these days:
April 30th Joseph opened a metal pencil case by himself. He climbed up two flights of stairs up to the top of our building, and quickly. He added a fourth word to his spoken vocabulary, at least I was fairly sure of it. (Mama, Papa and “nein” being the first three).
May 1st Joseph worked his way backwards down three stairs. He also played peek-a-boo with himself in a floor-length mirror. He stood up close to the edge and rocked to the side to “hide” and rocked back to show himself in the mirror. So cute!
May 3rd Joseph carefully stepped into one of his toy boxes (only about five inches tall) and squatted down. I thought it was cute until I thought maybe he could be peeing. I checked and sure enough, the damage was done. It seems he’s pretending to be a cat. Maybe I should clean out the potty and leave it in his reach and see if he’ll crawl over and squat on it himself when he needs to go.
We also started communicating with sings. I’ve been spotty introducing signs, but today he figured out that clapping his hands means “more.” It’s fun playing with him because I can use the “more” idea in a variety of situations, but then again he has a desire for more that tries my patience! He loves anticipation games like “this little piggy” and the like and will ask for more and more and more.
And it’s official. There is no doubt that Joseph added “dots” as his fourth spoken word. He asks me to show him the dots by saying “da” with the air stopped at the end (so it’s not “dah”). If I show him the dots he will say “da” and if I ask him while he’s playing “Joseph, would you like to see your dots?” he’ll stop what he’s doing and say “da!” After I help him do his summersaults he’ll look up at me and say “da” since often we look at dots after doing summersaults. Somehow this really amazes me, but it’s clear as day! Lest everything sound perfect, it seems to us that he hardly looks at the dots. He loves them, but he often looks at me or at stuff around us. I imagine when he looks at me he’s still taking it in, but otherwise it seems hard to believe. Well, at least it’s easy, doesn’t take much time, it’s clearly enjoyable and it taught him a word!
