Claire's Latest

So what's Claire been up to lately? Here's what:

Talking
After a few weeks when Claire didn't add many words to her vocabulary, she's been expanding her repertoire at an amazing pace recently. She will try to repeat almost anything I ask her to (she certainly seems to know what I mean when I ask her to say something). And lately she babbles constantly, seemingly in her own foreign language. So I know she has the urge to talk! However, I don't think her pronunciation is as good as Elsa's was at this stage. There are certain sounds she refuses to even try. When she attempts to repeat a word with one of these sounds, she just substitutes in a sound that she can say. As a result, her words almost always contain either a "b" sound or a "d" sound. There are even a few vowel sounds she's unable to say, notably the "ee" sound. But you'll have to trust me that she can give her sounds an amazing variety of inflections, so I find it surprisingly easy to interpret what she's saying. Here are a few of her latest words. These are items she actually knows and she can use these words independently (not just repeating them).

mouth - "mow"
eye
eyebrow - "eyebah"
nose - "noh"
flower - "wowah" (It took me a long time to figure out what she was referring to with this one. I finally realized she was saying it while pointing at the flowers painted on her bedroom wall.)
water - "wawa"
blueberry - "boobabah"
night night - "nigh nigh"
zu zu hamster - "zuh zuh"
peek a boo - "peh bah boh"
potato - "pehdadah"

She also loves to say hi and bye bye. And every time she sees a dog, she points at it and yells "Belle Belle" repeatedly at increasing volume until somebody responds.

Walking
Claire will now take steps and "walk" while holding onto our hands, which is definite progress. She moves her feet entirely of her own accord—I'm just there for balance. So that's a big step forward, figuratively and literally. However, she's extremely wobbly when she takes those steps. And she still has never even attempted to pull up to a stand by hanging onto furniture! It's like the thought has just never crossed her mind. Elsa had been doing it for over a month by this point. I think it's entirely possible that Claire will learn to walk before she pulls up to a stand. If so, I'm assuming that's pretty weird. But if she has her own unique way of doing things, I guess that's okay by me. She'll figure it out at some point, I'm sure!

In the meantime, Claire continues to scootch all over creation, and she's getting faster and faster at it. So she can certainly get where she wants to go. And since she doesn't attempt to climb stairs or pull up to furniture (and therefore pull things off furniture), I haven't needed to be very vigilant about keeping gates closed, which is admittedly nice. At this point I'm just hoping she'll be walking fairly well on her own by the time Elsa starts school again, because hauling Claire in and out of that school was such a pain last year (literally—my arms were always burning by the time I got her back in the car).

Sleeping
Claire's doing great here. She's usually in bed for the night at around 7 p.m., and doesn't ever seem to wake up before 7 a.m. Sometimes it's closer to 8. Elsa's usually up long before Claire. Claire has switched to one nap a day, but more because I was ready for that than she was. Claire happily takes a morning nap if I put her down for one, I just usually don't. I'd rather have her take one long middle-of-the-day nap than deal with the precision timing and inconvenience of two naps. This means she's usually pretty crabby and tired by about 11:30 a.m., so we've been having early lunches and then she's usually down by 11:45. She sleeps until around 2 p.m., sometimes 2:30 or 3 if Elsa's really quiet, and then she's up until bedtime. It's actually a pretty good schedule, I like it a lot, and I hope we can stick with it into the new school year!

Eating
After her initial reluctance to eat "real" food, I think it's safe to say that Claire has now embraced the concept. : ) She eats almost anything and everything Elsa eats. She's still more hit-or-miss than Elsa—the other night she refused to eat kielbasa and vegetables, even though she loved it on a previous night. And she doesn't seem to eat in such quantity as Elsa always has. Claire, in fact, has been known to leave food on her tray from time to time. Elsa's never heard of such a thing.

Playing
Claire still has little to no interest in television. She'll sit through five or ten minutes of Sesame Street before scootching off to do something else. This is completely different from Elsa, who was so fascinated by it that she would sit through entire hour-long episodes at this age. The only time Claire has paid attention to the TV was when we were driving to Michigan last month. And since Elsa was listening to it on headphones, Claire didn't even have the benefit of sound at the time. I think the increased interest was simply because Claire was trapped in the carseat—she had no place else to go and nothing else to look at.

Happily, Claire has shown increased interest in books lately. She especially loves her "Baby Faces" board book that shows happy babies, sad babies, sleeping babies, etc. She also loves the tiny book that came with Elsa's doll Carol. The story is made up of five sentences: "I change my baby. Baby goes for a walk. I bottle feed my baby. It's snack time! A cuddle." Seriously, that's the entire book. And she loves it. But hey, it's a start.