little guy update

It's been a while, so a quick update on the little guy. He had his 12 month check up in December, weighing in at 23.5 lbs and measuring 29.75 inches high (75th and 50th percentiles). His head, like E and me, is at 90th.

He's turning out to be a funny little guy, though the stubborn is already showing. Elizabeth was never much for tantrums, but I think we're going to get a few humdingers from him. The shriek he lets out when she takes something from him or he can't do what he wants has to be heard to be believed. Oh course, life isn't as fair for Andrew as it was for Elizabeth. He has to learn to navigate in a world where he's constantly being swooped up by her, spun around, deposited in another place, toys snatched, the whole works. He mostly adores her, but keeps a wary eye out, too.

Andrew was an excellent crawler, so despite his first steps happening a while ago, he stuck with the crawl until recently. The weekend of the big snow he really made the switch from primarily crawling to primarily walking. And now he'll crawl only if he's lost his balance and fallen down, and wants to get someplace quickly. Otherwise, he's really working on running.

He's finally figured out sign language, and is soooo pleased when he can communicate. Right now he does done, more, eat, milk, and drink. He's working on bath, brush teeth, ball, apple, and possibly mommy and daddy. He stubbornly refuses to point out body parts, despite (or maybe because of) my querying him constantly - where's your nose? Where's your ears? Just this week he grabbed my nose when asked, so I think this is coming.

He loves looking at books (he spent some of the drive to Florida paging through his stash of board books, all by himself), but he rarely will sit still to have a book read to him. When asked this week, he pointed out a baby, a dog, and a kitty in one of his books.

Verbally, he's trying. His first word was bye-bye. He says ma-ma and da-da, but not very often. He seems to have no word for Elizabeth. He's recently added baby. Rich thinks he says bath. He kind of has a sound for dog, but it doesn't seem like a fully formed word, yet.

He LOOOVES sports (Rich is very proud). He also has a sound for sports on TV, bup-ba, which sort of sounds like football (which is the most watched sport in this house at this time of year), or at least we pretend it does. When we turn on the TV to watch a game, he immediately stops and watches for a moment, letting out his excited chuckle. Our morning routine is for me to give him breakfast, break open the paper, hand him the sports section and page through the rest myself. He's been very entertained by the pictures in the paper, especially when a ball is shown (someone diving and making a catch).

His newest word is backpack!

When we were cleaning out Elizabeth's room, we found her small backpack. He immediately latched onto it and tried to put it on, getting one arm in. I put it on him completely and he was pleased as punch.


He likes to walk around chanting back pack back pack back pack. He is super excited when you put things in the backpack. If he's not wearing it and you say backpack he searches for it until he finds it and puts it on.

We may have to buy him his own back pack.