Baby Talk

Ada's focused on walking right now. She gets this intense and excited look on her face, then rushing stumble walks over to you, never breaking eye contact. She laughs and laughs.

This is really saying something, given that my poor baby has been a CRANKY girl for these last several weeks, gums swollen and bleeding as 4 molars and 4 eyeteeth try to break free at once. By the time she turns one in a few weeks, she might have all of her baby teeth. A long break before the 2-year-old molars would be nice for all of us.


Ada's increasingly comfortable taking 3-5 steps between things. Any further distance, and she attempts to map out a cruising route. Failing that, or in a big hurry, she just drops down and speed-crawls, which is the most adorable thing ever. I will be sad when this stage is over (not the teething part!).

When I say that Ada talks, it's hard to give an accurate reflection of what that means. Let me try a little harder. Ada babbles a lot, like many babies do. I love her fast angry babble, "Gah!Gah!Gah!Bla!Buh!NaNaNaNak!" There's her happy, keep-holding-my-hands-I-love-walking babble, which sounds like a little piece of song. And there's her singing itself, which transitions us into Ada's speech.

Ada labels things correctly, a scary lot of the time. She was 8 months old when her Uncle Rob said, "Quack!" across the room and she said, "Duck." By that time, she'd already been telling us some things (Mama, Dada, Wawa, etc.) for quite a while.

Lately, we might be reading a book that is not about teddy bears or kitty cats but if she sees a teddy bear or kitty cat in an illustration, she'll point it out and name it. I couldn't begin to list all of her words, partly because it's only gradually that I realize what they are. She's hard to understand a lot of the time - she's 11 months old! - but I suspect that quite a lot of her babbling sounds are actual words. And that it pisses her off that I don't recognize them.

Unlike her big sister, Ada's very much a schedule girl. If I don't have her in bed by 7:00, I'm likely to see quite a bit of this sort of thing:


She still nurses. She's very clear about what she does and does not want to eat at mealtime, though "Chezzo" (Cheerios) is one of the few foods she asks for by name. She loves to pinch my nose until I honk. She loves to say, "eye" and poke finger into her own, and then mine. She ate beef stew for dinner Saturday night, with a biscuit, just like her big sister, her parents, and her godmother. The next night was the "meatloaf" and "mashed potatoes." Tonight we all had cheeseburgers (with zucchini and mushrooms on whole grain) and baked sweet potato "fries." She eats some jars of food for convenience and nutrition, but at dinnertime she eats what we eat and loves it.

She does some of this:

And this:




Hopefully these pictures have have brightened your January Tuesday a little, just as their subject brightens mine.