Tuesday, June 5

Today was the first day Julia has walked more than she has crawled. You can see she’s really starting to prefer it, as she will now get back up and keep walking if she loses her balance, where before she would have just crawled the rest of the way. She’s also quite good – she takes small steps and doesn’t go too fast (yet!) so she seldom falls down, and when she does she always sits or puts out her hands and falls to all fours.

Saturday, June 9

Another big day. It’s becoming increasingly clear that Julia possesses significant language comprehension. This has been difficult to determine because she will not always perform on command. A few weeks ago she would clap or wave if asked, but she no longer will. That makes it difficult to tell if, when you ask her to show you something and she doesn’t, it’s because she doesn’t understand or she’s just not in the mood. But her Gramma and Grampa Weiss arrived yesterday for the weekend, and at one point when Gramma asked her “Julia, where is your toy basket?” Julia crawled across the room to her toy basket and pulled up. Today, she did the same thing when Nancy (a.k.a. Gramma) asked “Are you going to turn the pages of your book?” Julia headed around the coffee table to a large book that was there, opened it, and began flipping through the pages.

She also climbed the jungle gym standing up for the first time this morning. While she used to always climb the steps on the jungle gym, recently she has preferred to climb a ramp made of posts with small gaps in between for footholds. Today she held onto the side rail and hoisted herself up, picking up one foot at a time and moving it to the next post. Pretty neat!

Her most exciting demonstration today came when she and Josh were playing together. Josh picked up two rings from the stacker that our friends Ed and Jen gave her, and put them over his eyes like goofy glasses. When he put the rings down, Julia picked up one and held it out to him, as if saying, “Do it again, Daddy!” and then placed it over his eye, just in case he hadn’t gotten the message!

We also added the sign for bath today, but Julia hasn’t made any signs yet. She may just prefer to wait until she can talk, or we may see some signs in the future.

Monday, June 11

Once again we have a possible sign sighting. Today Julia was nursing and saw herself in a mirror. She held out her arm and with palm turned up, began making the nursing sign. To reinforce it, I said, “Julia, are you nursing? It’s good to nurse,” and made the sign properly, with my hand vertical instead of horizontal. When Julia saw this, she rotated her hand to mimic the way I was signing. Even if she wasn’t intentionally making the sign, this was interesting because she has not been much of a mimic in the past, preferring to do her own thing.

She’s also gotten very interested in pat-a-cake recently. She will pat my hand and I will say the rhyme. If she stops patting hands, I stop speaking. The first time I did this she looked immediately startled and went back to patting so the rhyme would continue.

Thursday, June 21

Julia cut her third tooth today, and the fourth one is clearly not far behind. Now she’ll have two on the top to match her pair on the bottom. This will enable her to bit into things, a useful skill since we’ve just started giving her wheat products, so she can now eat sandwiches. Because Josh and his father each have some food allergies, which tend to run in families and can be caused or exacerbated by early introductions of foods, we’ve been conservative about introducing new foods. We’ve added new foods one at a time, waiting a while in between each new food, to watch for any signs of a reaction. Julia eats all kinds of fruits and vegetables, she’s eaten turkey but has trouble chewing chicken, and she eats beans and non-wheat grain products, like rice cakes and oat cereals, but we’ve held off on the more allergenic foods: wheat, dairy, citrus, nuts, peanuts, soy, fish, shellfish, and eggs. Experts recommend that if you’re concerned about allergies, you wait until they’re a year old for most of those foods, longer for peanuts. Our plan was to start wheat on her birthday, then introduce dairy a few days later, but when she started absconding with her playmates’ Goldfish at the park last week, we decided we were close enough to start with wheat. We began giving her wheat crackers and whole wheat bread, and she’s really been loving it. 

Saturday, June 23

We finally think Julia’s gotten the nursing sign. This morning she made the sign when I asked if she wanted to nurse, and she continued to make the sign while she was nursing. Later in the day, she made the sign in the car when she hadn’t nursed in a while, so we thing she was asking to nurse. 

She attended Anna Metz’s wedding in Durham, North Carolina, today, and had a great time. She’s really doing tons of walking; we almost never see her crawling anymore. She wore her pink and white linen party dress and hat to the reception and was told she was the best dressed person there (bride excluded, I’m sure!)

Wednesday, June 27

Julia is figuring out how to communicate what she wants even though she doesn’t have any words yet. When she sees the Cheerios box, she points and vocalizes to get some. She even once pointed at the closed cabinet after she saw me put the Goldfish crackers away. Today, she pointed at the door, saying, “Aaaah! Aaaah!” I assumed she wanted to go to the park, so out we went. 

She’s also experienced a resurgence of clapping, and is suddenly applauding everything. Waving, on the other hand, is out of favor, and she will no longer wave when asked. She only appears to be interested in skills like this until she’s mastered them, then she abandons them to work on her next trick.