Liam has been learning a lot of new tricks from his favorite gal pal Cora. One of the first ones I got to enjoy was when I was reading him his pre-nap story about a week ago. We were sitting up in the rocking chair in his room reading "Brown Bear Brown Bear" a gift from our friends Lynn and Zack. And every time I would lift the board book page to prepare to turn it, he would lean forward and try to peek around the page to see the next picture. Then he started reaching out with his hands and pulling the page over to the far side.
And as we kept reading it became totally obvious that he wasn't just grabbing things randomly, he was actually performing an intentional action: he was turning pages. He would reach out to grab the page on the right and turn it until it was on the left. Then he'd look at the picture and then reach to turn the next page. What a little sponge. Without ever knowing he was learning, he had picked up the pattern of reading a book together! I know his friend Cora who he spends three afternoons a week with knows how to turn pages (she's a year old) and I think seeing another baby do it probably gave him the idea.
We've had lots of fun with books lately. Last week on tuesday we went with our playgroup to story time at the Library, which is a really fun event with singing and puppets and juggling and stories. And then when we got home from the library with a few new board books, I sat on the floor with Liam and held two out in front of him. He looked very seriously back and forth at the two covers for a while and then very purposefully put his hand out on one. I had never seen him so intentionally "choose" something before, show his preferences and his will with a gesture. It was wonderful fun to see.
But I almost couldn't believe it was on purpose. I read him his first choice book and when we finished again I held two different books up in front of him and again he looked back and forth before reaching out and touching the book on the right ("Whats the Matter Pookie?"). I switched the position of the two books so Pookie was on the left, and again he reached out and touched the Pookie book. The baby was making a choice! Super fun.
Since then every time we read I offer him the choice of two books, he picks one, and we read. He has some fairly consistent preferences. "Brown Bear" is his favorite book of all. Paired against almost any other book, he will pick Brown Bear to read. Beyond that he really loves a new Boynton book we picked up from the library about Hippos and their belly buttons, and a book called "Daddy Loves Me." He never ever picked "Moo Baa Lalala."
This is also a kid who lives to prove me wrong. We've been checking over and over for teeth and there were no signs of it. Likewise we've been working on helping him learn crawling with every means I could think of. I even played baby "wheel barrow" with him where he would lift and move his hands forward and I would shift his knees.
So on the way to his 9 month baby well visit with the pediatrician on friday I joked with Terry about how we were going to have to confess that he was a bit behind him milestones, unless he pulled another surprise and just started crawling on the doctor's table (remember the rolling incident?).
Well, one of the first questions I had was about teeth. He's been drooling and chewing on everything since he was 4 months old. When were those teeth coming? And the doctor looks in his mouth and says "There's one breaking through the gum right now" and sure enough you could see a little rupture in the gum. His first tooth!
Then, later that evening while we were getting dinner ready I put the baby down on all fours in the living room and sat down on the couch. Then like it was nothing, like he'd been practicing for months, he just took four crawling "steps" forward, grabbed his toy, and sat down to play with it. I practically stammered at Terry (who was in the kitchen looking at him) "Did I just imagine that? Did you see that? Did he just crawl?!"
But for the life of me, I cannot get the kid to do it on command. If I grab the camera and try to covertly catch him, no dice. He won't do it. If I stand over him and try to entice him to crawl by dragging a fun toy in front of him, no dice. If I walk away and pretend like I'm not watching, there he goes, crawling again. I have now seen him crawl six or seven times. It's adorable!
