(Okay, so she's nearly 12 months, but not yet. Not quite yet.)
Eliane is developing quite a sense of play. Yesterday she initiated a game of chasies with me, crawling a little away from me, then turning around and waving an arm at me as if to beckon me on. Then as soon as I started towards her she'd turn around a crawl helter skelter (though not always in exactly the right direction to escape), giggling madly.
She also likes to play pass the spoon - or maybe not. She takes the spoon from me while I'm feeding her* and then offers it back, but giggles and pulls it back away as soon as I reach for it. That one is learned - I do the same thing with her sometimes, not with the spoon particularly, but with something else (a toy I suppose), offering it and then retracting it at the last minute a few times until she is really laughing. Then I give it to her (Elli doesn't seem to have cottoned on to that last bit though!). But the game of chasies she seems to have come up with all on her own.
I remember Liam playing chasies with another little toddler at our original mother's group once, when they were even a bit younger than this I think - they were both early crawlers. They had the whole mothers group (the mothers that is) in fits of laughter, watching them. From memory Liam was in front, and we weren't quite sure that the little girl who was chasing him was in on the joke. Liam would crawl away then stop, turn around and wait for her to almost catch up, and then crawl off again, giggling. It was very cute.
My baby - my last baby - is nearly all growed up into a toddler. Lots of people said that with the third child, you just survive that first year, you just have to get through it. And I do see what they mean - things are getting easier now, in some ways: Elli's cutting down to one nap a day, she's often spending most of that nap asleep alone, and she spends lots of time crawling around entertaining herself so that I can, for instance, write this blog entry. But on the other hand I feel like the really easy part is over, as far as parenting goes. The part where you just have to love them and cuddle them, nurse them and make the sacrifice of letting them sleep on your lap while you read and book and the lucky Daddy gets to look after the big kids and do the housework. The part where they don't get cross, can't stick forks in power outlets and are so happy to be outside with the wind on their little face that they'll just sit in the pram and let you hang out the clothes or plant out the basil, without complaining about not being allowed to eat the mud.
Elli's just transitioning into that phase where she gets cross when I don't pick her up instead of just grizzly. Where she's as likely to yell in anger, when dragged around in the car for too long, as to cry in misery. And not that I liked listening to her cry in misery either, but somehow the yelling in anger is a more challenging behaviour to respond to. It's not that it makes me angry back - I know from experience that it's when they hit the magic age of three that my buttons start to get pushed that way. It's more just that it starts to require a different response from me.
I think we messed up a little with Mikaela by treating her baby tantrums (which started at age 6 months!) differently to toddler tantrums. Meaning, we just gave in, far too often. She was only a baby, after all. But that sent the wrong message right from the word go, one we are still working on reversing. So with Eliane, I am making a concerted effort not to give in to anger. I am working on the distract theory instead, which is fine (though not much use when she's trapped in a car seat she doesn't like), but not as easy nor as satisfying parentally as picking her up and comforting her was when she would get sad rather than cross.
Anyway, I know I'm romantising the first 12 months, but I did love them, and now they are (almost) over. When Liam was this age he was much closer to walking than Elli is (he'd been taking a few steps at a time since 10&1/2 months and was fully walking by a few days past 12 months), but I still hung on to thinking of him as a baby rather than a toddler. Somehow with Eliane she's almost made that transition in my mind already, even though she's only been crawling for about three or four weeks. Maybe it's because after having three of them, I am finally able to remember - sort of - what a young baby is really like. And she's so far past that now.
Luckily though, she's still awfully, awfully cute.
__________
* Eliane eats quite a lot now, probably more than either Mikaela or Liam did at this age - in fact way more than Liam did - and we mix it up between finger food, spoon food, feeding her exactly what we're eating or giving her bought baby food. The only thing I don't do is puree any of my own food. When she was younger I would mash it up or maybe cook it a bit longer, but make food especially for her? No. That I don't have time for.
Recent Comments