I thought it was time to give an update on Sullivan's progress. At present, at 9mos, she is still fascinated with her hands: waving them, twisting them, flicking them back and forth, opening and closing them and most often, furiously grabbing whatever item in her view that is most interesting. The other day she practically dove out of my arms to grab hold of my paddle hairbrush on the counter. Convinced that she couldn't grasp it as it is almost as big as she is and does weigh at least a pound, I was stunned that the impending danger of falling headfirst did not deter her and she swiftly clasped her little paw around it and brought it straight to "discovery central," her mouth. Stunning! She also learned to clap last week and gave me "five" this morning in a patty-cake fashion. Neat!
She is also babbling new sounds almost daily which include "dah dah, juh, gah,bah bah, pa" and many combinations. She doesn't associate dah-dah with Lee yet. As we are raising her with both Spanish and English (we are doing the one-parent, one-language model, opol, with me in Spanish and Lee in English) she may have some delays in speech, but so far I can not see any. In fact, she seems very attuned to my every sound. I am quite sure that her inquisitive, steady gaze each time I switch to English, addressing someone else, is proof that she knows exactly the moment when I switch languages. I'll keep you posted on her first words...I don't know if they'll be in Spanish or English, although my guess would be Spanish as Lee's work keeps him away. So far, babble is babble and I can tell no preference for either language.
As her language is taking off, she remains physically pretty still. No crawling, but lots of standing on laps and on the ground. She is now able to stand unassisted for a few seconds, while holding onto furniture or something at her shoulder-height. She did assume the crawl position, with her torsoe off the crowd, for the first time today...but she didn't take move forward or backward. I am wondering that I didn't place her on her tummy enough. Oh well, she will become mobile one day, in her own time.
