11 months old

Thought I'd post a couple recent pictures that show some of Jack's new "skills." One thing he loves doing these days is holding things in his mouth. This can be toys or objects, as is the case with the chopstick above. Nat demonstrated this trick to him one time and now anytime he has a stick or a straw he puts it in his mouth sideways and puts his arms up to show off. He thinks he's pretty funny, an idea which we encourage by laughing at him each and every time he does it. When he wants to be extraordinarily cute, he crawls around with the object in his mouth, pretending to be Corydon. It's hard to handle so much adorability.

On the other side of the coin, he also has taken to holding food in his mouth. In particular, food he doesn't like. I am not exactly sure what he's holding in his mouth in the rocking chair picture (my chair from when I was little, by the way), but it's likely to be a fruit or vegetable.. At any rate, he has been known to hold a piece of food in there for up to a half hour, along with a substantial quantity of drool. He's becoming familiar with being held over the kitchen sink while we dig out the morsel in question so he can move on with life. Toys and random objects held in mouth: adorable. Food and drool: not so much. Sigh.

I am finding it is both exciting and tiresome to live with an 11 month old baby. Exciting because it seems that he is developing new skills every hour (see the bulleted list below). One can almost watch the neural paths develop. He's always been an attentive kid but now there is attentiveness with intent. He watches and watches as we talk or press a button or make a noise or motion, then he tries it. Sometimes he's right on and he's got it right away. Sometimes he's not even close but you know he's working on it. Plus he's really getting a sense of humour. He jokes around, doing things to make us laugh, engaging us in games of peek and chase. He thinks anything placed on our heads is hilarious and he's very ticklish. He has a lot to say these days even if we can't understand it.
The tiresome aspect is that with all this learning and emerging individuality comes a baby who is often tired or frustrated, who now screams and arches when we tell him "no" because he has such definite ideas about what he wants to do. He can get into an amazing amount of trouble with his desire to climb combined with his lack of caution. And, to top it off he is getting his molars and is in pain off and on throughout the day, which manifests itself as whining and indecision. My least favorite new habit of his: he will come over and grab my legs and whine to be picked up-- not bad in itself-- but then, when I pick him up-- he'll immediately whine to be put down. And once he's down-- you guessed it... I am perfectly aware that he is not doing this to annoy me; in fact, I am learning this behavior is usually indicative of being tired or ouchy. But it is still guaranteed to get me in a bad mood.
All this said-- I do think the excitement wins out. He is a pretty engaging and amazing creature these days.

New skills:
*imitating a dog panting when we say or point out a dog (we sometimes have to pant first to show him, sometimes he does it on his own)
*Saying "hi" more often (though still only on his own terms)
*Vocalizing a TON, jabbering away to himself, often with a look on his face that seems to say "I MEAN it!!" Sounds he produces a lot: nee-nee, ni-ni, dis, dat, di-di, be
*Chasing and being chased. He's discovered the "loop" around the first floor and delights in racing after us, or being chased as we dramatically "run" very slowly after him. Giggles and furious slapping of hands on the floor. It's a riot.
*Turning pages of books. While his attention span for books is brief, for the 3-4 pages he'll attend to, he really attends, touching the pictures and turning the pages.
*Jack has discovered money. Last night he spent quite a while holding and playing with a few coins with Mike. He only tried to eat them twice. :) He would hold a coin in his fist when open his hand flat and look at it with amazement. His fine motor skills are really pretty good, I think, from the way he was picking up dimes off the floor.
*Novelty. Anything in the world is interesting to him, for approximately 30 seconds. Then, we better come up with something new for him to explore. Exceptions to this are brooms or rakes or anything with a long handle, for which he has infinite patience and attention. He's a funny duck.