Taking it to the Next Level (16 months)

Ian is now well into his 16th month, and into a sorts of new things. One of his main new interests is climbing. In addition to climbing onto the coffee table, etc., on his own, he uses props intentionally. Here he has pushed his little blue chair over to the piano into order to reach what's on top (a place I previously put things I didn't want him to be able to reach. sigh.):



In addition to learning plenty of new words, there are several things he has done lately that indicate his increasingly understanding of his world and ability to interact with it:

- Doug was leaving for the YMCA this weekend and couldn't find his keys. Remembering that I had seen Ian take them off the table earlier, I asked Ian "Where are Daddy's keys?". He quickly went over to his toy bins, opened one, retrieved the keys he had stashed there, and brought them to Daddy. We were impressed that he understood the question, remembered where he had put them at least an hour earlier, and knew what to do to respond!

- Ian has been able to identify body parts for quite a while now. Tonight, we were all sitting in the living room and we asked him, "where are your ears?". He pulled on his own ears, then Doug's. Then he came over to me and pointed to my ears, then to Lilo and pulled on her ears, then to Zrbrt and pointed to her ears. We were impressed that his body part identification was robust to species. He did the same thing with noses, and then, to our surprise, belly buttons! He lifts up his or our shirts to find our belly buttons, and we were impressed when he went over to Zrbrt and pointed to the middle of her belly -- this seems like quite a different thing to identify.

- At the playground with Daddy on Sunday, Doug was getting ready to head home after they had spent a while going up and down the small slide. As they were leaving, Ian pointed to the full size slide and signed "more". So Doug let him climb up (above where Doug could reach), and he slide all the way down by himself saying "Wheeeee!"

- We are still waiting for the anticipated vocabulary explosion, but Ian is certainly continuing to learn new words. This morning I heard two for the first time "cheese", and "more". He says "more" quite slowly, which I think is because it's the most complicated word he has attempted -- instead of just imitating a part of the word like usual ("meh" for melon, "Zzzz" for Zrbrt, "Nana" for nursing (or banana)). When he says "more", he actually sounds out the whole word.

- Ian loves to learn noises of things even more than words. He spends a lot of timing pointing to pictures in his "baby's first 100 words" book and wanting to hear the noises they make, or making them himself. He is also quite aware of sounds around him. We often hear fire sirens (the fire station is nearby), and trains (train station also pretty nearby). He notices these sounds even when I don't and imitates them.

- In addition to books with individual words and pictures, Ian is showing interest in books with plots. I have read through the entire 60 page "Are You My Mother?" at his request about a dozen times in the past week. This is the first time he's shown a sustained interest in such a long book, and one that does not rhyme.

- The fact that Ian can remember things long term is now apparent. He likes to look at photos and identify people in them (especially "Da-deeeeeeeee"). Getting our wedding photo book down to look at is one of his main motivations for climbing up to reach the top of the piano. We are especially impressed that Ian can identify Greg in photos, since he hasn't seen him in person in months. Even in our wedding photos, in which Greg is a clean cut young man who is nearly unidentifiable as the predecessor to the hairy uncle Ian knows, he can routinely point out "Ga-Ga". In fact we started looking through photos because Ian saw the men working on our yard construction project and insisted on finding "Ga-Ga". He remembered that Greg worked in the yard when he was here. He was very mad the first morning the guys were working when I put him in the car to leave, seemingly preventing him from finding his uncle, who was surely among the bearded men in the backyard!

- On a gross note, Ian has started requesting kisses from the dogs. Lilo is somewhat shocked by this, but sometimes complies. Zrbrt happily licks his face all over whenever he wants. He finds this hilarious (Doug is also delighted, making the chances of me discouraging this gross behavior rather small).

Speaking of the dogs, we had the pleasure of a visit from our good friend Hermit Thrush over the holiday. As a first year vet school student, she was happy to get some practice doing physical exams on dogs (note from Lilo's curled under tail how much she enjoys this -- at the real vet she actually attempts to melt into the floor):






Much more than vet exams, they enjoy life like this:





We have just located the charger for the video camera while sorting through the last of the things from the move, so there should be Ian videos to post soon . . .