Katherine at 1

[dtm]

Katherine actually turned 1 on January 3rd, so several weeks ago now, but if I wait until she hits another milestone age, I'll never actually post.



So here's bits and pieces of typical Katherine behavior these days:

• She's getting much more confident moving around the furniture and very rarely falls down as a result of attempting to edge along. She can now stand easily with just a flat surface to brace herself against, though I've not seen her try to edge along the wall.
  
  
• Sometime this month, she managed to acquire two new teeth. Unlike her first two, the center bottom teeth, these are both on her left side so that now, although she has teeth on both the top and bottom gums, they still aren't aligned, which makes chewing difficult.
  
  
• Speaking of chewing, she's had some changes in her eating behavior over the past several weeks and we're having trouble figuring out what's going on. She'll eat a new food gladly one day and then reject it the next - if she'd reject foods right from the start, we might understand, but she just seems to occasionally develop a dislike for one food or another.
  
  For a few days (about 2 weeks) it looked as though we had found an easy finger food for Katherine - both Gerber and Del Monte make these no-sauce ravioli toddler foods, and Katherine was just devouring them when we put them on her tray. We were happy, because we didn't have to sit there and stuff food in her face, and she seemed happy with the food. Then, suddenly, one day she just wanted no more to do with it.
  
  I think that the issue is that she's rejecting food which she knows is baby food. Yesterday, I tore up a piece of baloney for her and she'd have nothing to do with it. When I gave her a whole piece, however, that she could tear up and chew on herself, she loved it, and ate most of it. Also, today she wouldn't touch her chicken pieces (which she normally loves); however, once I made some vegetables to go with them, and put the vegetables on her tray, after they had been sitting on a grown-up plate to cool down, she then happily ate everything. She also will beg for food if we eat anything and, if we're not careful and are eating where she's able to do it, steal some off our plates. She really wants the adult food.
  
  The solution is probably going to be that Katherine will just have to eat a smaller portion of what we eat. This would be fine if we ate normal, home-cooked food on a normal schedule. Unfortunately, lately I've just been microwaving frozen dinners and Jennifer and I haven't been keeping any kind of normal meal schedule.
  
  
• We're not spoon-feeding Katherine anymore except for breakfast, and there we're only putting food on the spoon and handing it to her - she's the one who guides the spoon into her mouth. Her technique is to garb the spoon right behind the bowl, stick the bowl of the spoon into her mouth, and turn the spoon over. It works, so long as I hang on to the far end of the spoon to keep her from accidentally dropping all the food in her lap.
  
  
• People occasionally ask us if she has any words yet, and we're not quite sure. One syllable which she says consistently is "ow". We're not sure yet what this means - she says it in response to us when we say "ow" (which we do often), she's said it in response to someone on TV saying "meow", and she's even said it once or twice in response to one of the cats meowing. She also occasionally says "ow" to us to get us to say it back to her, which can go on for a while. By responding to her, you can sometimes have her say "wow" instead of "ow". Of course, she's also making all sorts of other baby-babble sounds: "eeeeee", "dai-dai-dai-dai-dai", "wummumumum um", etc.
  
  
• We've been trying to teach her the sign for "please", after seeing her second cousin use it over Thanksgiving. However, I think we haven't been consistent enough, because she just isn't learning. She'll now make the sign, but I think that she makes the sign just to have us say "please"; she's already got motions that make the grown-ups say "Yay, Katherine" (clapping her hands) and "So big!" (stretching her hands up over her head), so the please sign has just been added to the repertoire. Occasionally when she's sitting in her highchair she'll go through the whole series quickly to have the adults keep up. She's also been doing the please sign combines with saying "ow" when I change her diaper - I don't know what that's about.
  
  
• Katherine has been handing us board books and we've been reading them to her, and she'll often help turn the page. (Such as when she's bored, she'll just turn all the remaining pages at once and close the book) Her favorite at the moment appears to be Opposites, by Sandra Boynton, but it doesn't seem to be a strong preference and may just represent where it is in the toy basket and how easy it is to get it out. Occasionally she just crawls off once we start reading, but often she'll stay through the end of the book and then look for another to hand to us.

There's surely more, which I might get to in another entry.

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