Whirling Dervish

Sadie is now a toddler in the most literal sense of the word. Typical parents must go through something similar when their children hit 12 months -- a refusal to sit in a stroller, to be carried, to even so much as sit down.

We went to the zoo yesterday and she wanted to walk around the entire place. Do you understand how large the LA Zoo is? She's drunk on her own power.

After dinner, she now goes through a lengthy period during which she decides to careen wildly around the house in circles. Watch the video below, and now imagine that it's on repeat for half an hour each evening. Not that I'm complaining! It's a fun time at our house right now.

MOTORIN!

Sadie is 19 months old now. Around the 18 month mark, she took her first independent steps. She promptly stashed this skill in her pocket and took it out again only on very rare occasions.

"So I did that," she seemed to say. "Why should I bother doing it again?"

She still whined and hesitated each time we prompted her, "Walk walk, Sadie!" She still reached out for my hand before taking a step. She still burst into annoyed tears if I refused to do so, and would fall to her knees to crawl after whatever it was she wanted. Walking simply wasn't a skill she was interested in refining.

I guess I'd always figured that on the day she finally walked without our help, she'd never ask for it again. This wasn't the case. I can understand why. It takes tremendous effort for her. She struggles to lift each leg then plops it back down again, giving the impression that they're made of cement rather than skin and bone. Keeping her balance is difficult. She has a long way to fall.

So we've continued to be patient, and to prompt her while letting her figure it out at her own pace. (I remind myself that while most kids her age don't have this problem, the twelve month-olds at the park are looking at her and thinking, "Looking pretty steady there, stretch. What's your secret?")

Then this weekend happened. Beginning with Friday, really. We went to Balboa Park with my friend Liane and her daughter Sophie to see the ducks, and Sadie walked a lot holding my hand. Then after nap time was school, which always seems to motivate her. She spent a good fifteen minutes walking up and down a ramp in the outside playground, with the help of a couple of the teachers (she's a class favorite). Then Teri brought Addy over for a play date, and the two girls played in the back yard for the rest of the afternoon.

Then, yesterday. What happened that clicked in my daughter's head? I'll never know exactly what it was. Sadie and I met Grandma and Grandpa (my parents) at UCLA and spent the morning walking around campus, looking at the Bruin statue and splashing in the inverted fountain and counting steps and eating fries at the food court and rolling down grassy hills. There were birds and squirrels and people singing and dancing and laughing everywhere. Sadie could barely stand being in her stroller. She mostly walked between us, holding our hands, chattering constantly.

After we came home that afternoon, I tried to take her for a walk in the stroller and she complained the entire time, demanding to walk. Once we got home, she got out of the stroller and that was it -- she took off across the room like it was nothing.

And she hasn't stopped since.

Walkie Walkie

...is what Sadie says when she wants to get up and go. So this is what happened last night right after she announced her intention to Walkie Walkie. I'm glad I pulled out the iPhone when I did, because I've never seen Sadie walk more than a couple of feet at a time and suddenly...well, see for yourself!

Parrot

The other day Sadie and I were over at our friends D and T's house for a play date with their incredibly adorable year-old son, and the topic of my cracked-out day care instructor came up. This led to a conversation about baby development. T mused that the time in between nine and twelve months was when the most stuff seemed to "happen," -- the big developmental leaps, the ability to move around, the refining of personality.

Sure enough, in the weeks following that play date, Sadie has been transforming day to day before our eyes in ways that completely astonish me. Her growth from six months to nine, while impressive in little individual ways, was almost a throwaway compared with that she's suddenly done in between months nine and ten. At six months, she sat and fell over frequently. At seven months she...sat longer and fell over slightly less frequently. At eight months, she was still rejecting anything but puree, napping three times a day, and still occasionally falling over.

Now? It's basically impossible to catalog the things that are drastically and immeasurably changing, as she leapfrogs over her past accomplishments every day with new ones.

For one thing, she stands. Like, LOVES to stand. I place her standing up in her play pen, holding onto the top bar, and she stands there, squealing with glee from her new, tall vantage point. She's tall, this baby. She looks like a skyscraper, all weirdly narrow and still going when most other babies stop. She has realized, from watching other people, that moving your feet up and down is a necessary component of walking, but she doesn't quite understand how it figures in -- so when you support her while standing up she lifts her feet in place and stomps them back down again, all, "Am I doing this right?"

And remember all that lunacy over the crawling, or lack of it? Yeah -- last week, she decided she was ready to start. Some babies take months to learn how to crawl; this girl had utterly no interest in it until she hit ten months old and NOW she's not just ready, she wants to master it immediately. So she flips over all the time -- on the changing table, on the floor, when I'm putting her in her carseat -- and commences with the very loud grunting and flailing of limbs as she attempts to move forward. What happens right now is that she actually moves BACKWARD, and please believe me when I say I've been attempting to capture this on video, because this is the kind of shit I'm going to enjoy showing her when she's older.

Lastly, my very favorite development is the parroting. If there's one area in which I never had to do the stupid first-time mom "my baby isn't as far along as ALL THE OTHER BABIES" panic-dance, it's talking. Right from the start, Sadie couldn't wait to start babbling, and now she keeps up a steady stream of conversation at all times, even if it's just to her toys, or, casually, to the air in front of her. 

And now, quite out of the blue, she's begun mimicking the cadence of words and phrases. Not the words themselves -- but the tone of them.  "Uh oh!" is a favorite, that being the thing I sing-sing most often when she drops stuff, because it's more pleasant to the ear than "Really? You had to hurl your pacifier across the room AGAIN? You know that's the last clean pacifier, right? All the others are in the dishwasher. I'm not going to go wash off this pacifier. I've done it five times already. A little dust is not going to kill you. Here you go and this time try not to -- DAMN IT TO HELL WHAT DID I JUST TELL YOU?!" And so instead I say, "Uh oh!" and she sings it back to me in the same pitch, smiling sweetly and waiting for me to shriek, "smart girl!" and cover her with kisses, which I do, inevitably, every time.