Ten Month Update

Only 61 days left until Nicholas's first birthday!  Oh. My. God.

Anyway, today we mark ten months since his birth, which seems impossible.  Frankly, it seems impossible that a month has passed since the end of February.  For some reason (probably that we actually kept to our routine and were not interrupted by business trips and massive snowstorms) the last four weeks have gone ridiculously fast.  And Nicholas seems to be developing incredibly rapidly and plateauing, depending on which day it is.  So let's review what's new the last few weeks, even if it repeats items we've already mentioned.

• His language skills have improved exponentially.  This month he very strongly began to associate words with meanings.  He now understands "yay!" (that means we all clap our hands); "peek-a-boo!" (which prompts him to try to play peek-a-boo); "bottle;" "bath;" and a few others.  It has helped enormously, because we are more able to communicate with him, but it also means that we need to be more careful about what we say.  For example, "Should we give him a bath tomorrow?" he hears as "wah wah wah wah BATH wah wah?"
• Relatedly, he has begun to communicate with us, if without words.  When he wants to nurse, he walks Sarah to the spot on the couch where she sits to nurse him.  When he wants a bottle, he walks us over to the kitchen counter where we keep the bottles.  And he walks us over to the bathtub three or four times a day just to check whether there's water in it for him.
• At the same time, he's adding syllables to his vocabulary by the day.  His favorite for most of the last two weeks has been "up," though he now also mimics when I say "aaah."  Every once in a while we hear something else, the occasional "dah" or "ummmm."  There were even a few days where he walked around saying "hanya," and any former Glee Club members who read the blog will understand just how much that warmed my heart.
• He's getting really good at holding himself up and walking, though still always with support.  He can stand on his own for a few seconds at a time.  Actually, we suspect he could probably do it for far longer, but he tends to have what we call Wile E. Coyote moments when no one's holding him: he's fine until he realizes that he's totally free, and lunges for something, which causes him to fall.
• He feeds himself!  (When he wants to.)  He's getting pretty good at the pincer, picking things up with thumb and forefinger, which means we can now give him Cheerios to play with and/or eat while preparing his other foods.  It also means that we can give him lots of real food, including sweet potatoes, bananas, peaches, the occasional piece of chicken, and more.  Sometimes he just refuses to pick up food (I can't blame him since it's hard to pick up something as slimy as a peach).  But he will take things off of his fork, or, more fun, mine.
• He loves daycare.  He's gotten over his separation anxiety, and now enjoys being left with the staff.  Now, he is always excited to see us in the afternoon when we arrive to pick him up, but it seems to have clicked for him that when we leave, we'll be back.  Also he has fun there and gets to eat lots of food every day.

Those are the big things I can think of right now, which is basically my way of saying that Sarah will reserve the right to append her thoughts over the weekend when she has a little more time.