Michael at 13 months

Here is a summary of Michael at nearly 13 months. He is so cute at this age I don't ever want it to end. Kind of.

He was being awfully quiet while I was in the kitchen doing dishes....

Rob has now learned to better protect his cookies.

Eye color: mysterious. But I think they sort of match the rug in this picture, don't they? I can now rule out blue, but they don't really look like my brown color just yet. So either brown or hazel, I suppose, but they are still sort of this mystery color. When he was younger there were many days I thought they looked like they were going to be blue. But that hue has disappeared.

Favorite word: titta. It's swedish for "look!", and he goes around all day pointing at everything and saying, "teeeee-tah! tee-tah!".

Other words: dada, mama (although today he was looking at my (Lorena) picture and proclaimed "dada!", so we still have some ground to cover...), Jesus (we have a little Christus statue that he is fascinated with lately and he points and says "jzzzz-ah".), and just yesterday - goose (ghhhzzzzz). He thinks that word is hilarious for some reason and would laugh with glee the first 30 or so times I said it.

Comfort item: his Bear Suit (the brown sleep sack), although he'll sort of snuggle up to almost any fuzzy blanket or stuffed animal. He makes these sweet sounding gurgly gggggggghhhhh and mmmmmmmm sounds when he grabs it and puts it to his face, and I can tell without even looking that he must've found his Bear Suit.

Bedtime books: The Going to Bed Book, by Sandra Boynton - this has been read to him literally every night almost since his birth.
Rob also reads him a pop-up version of "Guess How Much I Love You" before bed, which is one of the cutest books on the planet, I believe. At least it is when Rob reads it to Smalls. Oh, and Karl the Chicken.

Favorite toy: books. He just can't get enough of books. If it was almost anything else I might be worried, but I guess no one ever read too many books. If it is not him wanting to be read to, then it is him pulling them off the shelves, or sliding them across the floor, or flipping through them himself. I guess to be more general, he just loves pictures. Because he always begs to look at the pictures on the walls also.

New interesting activity: dropping stuff off the second floor opening to the bottom floor and watching it crash. Today he did it with an apple and that became a bit messy.

Favorite things to find and point at: fans and lights. Last week we went to visit Rob's office and Smalls made his way around every room finding and pointing to every fan on the whole floor. The other day we were at a friend's house, he wandered off, and sure enough I found him in her bedroom pointing at the fan and yelling "teee-tah! teee-tah!". There are many more examples.

Other random fascinations: sewer caps, drain grates, and plant pots. He will find them all and pick away at them. It's not so much the plant pot, per se, but the dirt or rocks that are inevitably in the pot. He loves flowers too, but that is obvious. Who wouldn't.

Signs: butterfly* and slide. He surprised me yesterday when he did the slide sign back for the first time. I was pretty excited. Both totally useless, but it is fun, which is the whole point of it to me anyway.  The ones that would be potentially more useful, like "more", "food", "all-done", or "I'm bored - entertain me!", I usually have no mistake interpreting from him anyway. Usually.**

Favorite playground activity: the slide. The swing lost best-thing-ever status once he learned to walk.

Favorite food: grapes. He practically levitates with excitement when he sees these at the grocery store.

Funny new development: likes to feed us his food. Soooo cute. When he gets really into it he starts to take the food out of his own mouth to feed me. I tell him, "no, I want this" and I hand him another piece of food from his tray for him to put in my mouth. But then he puts that piece in his mouth too, before he takes it out to feed me. Gross. But I don't really care because he's my boy and it's fun.

And, finally, Rob and I both think it is pretty awesome that he drinks from our sports bottles. For a while he refused sippy cups and bottles and would only use our sports bottles. Now he'll drink from whatever, but we think it's pretty cute with the sports bottle and we have like a million of them from my biking days. He has refused milk ever since he was weaned at 12 months, so it's just water. I have to make sure he gets plenty of cheese and yogurt.

*credit to Roxanne for teaching him that. :)
**This leads me to a random question. Suppose, hypothetically, that Rob and I were bad parents and forgot to give him his snack right on time because we were trying to get us out the door for our little outing. And Smalls was being WAY whiny. And it took me several minutes to remember that it was because he was well overdue for his snack.
Okay, now here is the question:  If he was capable of saying "I'm hungry - feed me!", would he have? Do you think that at 13 months, he would even have enough bodily awareness to know that he was being whiny because he was hungry and wanted food? Of course he eagerly ate his food as soon as I presented it to him and was immediately in a better mood. But I just wonder. Because even as an adult I am prone to certain moods from things like fasting (fast Sunday yesterday), or an achy back, or a case of "the pmmms" (as Rob calls it), and I don't even realize the root cause until later. So I wonder if a kid could say "I'm hungry" at that age, if it would even do any good. I sort of doubt it, barring the extreme. I feel like there might have to be some real neglect - way past the whiny mood stage - before they thought "I'm hungry". But I obviously don't really know. Just curious for any thoughts. Perhaps from the owner of a 3 year old who is capable of saying it. Do they? Or do they still just act whiny?