One Year

One year...one year from a tiny, helpless newborn who can't hold his head up to an energetic toddler who can feed himself. When I was pregnant, I wasn't sure I was ready for just how quickly my baby would grow and change. After Evan was born, I would look at babies a few months older and think, I'm going to have one of those in just months? It's been a lot of fun to watch Evan reach new milestones this past year, but when I look back, the changes are just phenomenal.

Overall, I'm loving this age. I think the word that best describes Evan now is inquisitive. While he's always loved exploring, now it's less about going and more about doing. He's slowing down (at times, anyway) and figuring out how things work. He's currently fascinated by stacking things - blocks and whatever else he can find. Several times now he has sat on the floor of his room with me before bedtime and spent a half hour building towers. Considering Evan learned to crawl before he sat up on his own, for a while I didn't think he would ever sit for a half hour doing anything. At around eleven months, he become interested in stuffed animals again after totally ignoring them for about seven months. Now he babbles to them, usually in a higher voice than he uses to talk to people. He's become very interested in books. I think I could read him all his board books (around 20 now) five times each every day and he wouldn't get tired of them. He's also figured out doors recently and shut himself in his room the last two days. Let's hope he doesn't figure out locks for a while.

His language development is beginning to take off. I started teaching him a few signs when he was six months old, and while he started doing "milk" and "eat" around seven months, by nine months he wasn't signing at all and didn't even seem to respond much to me signing them. He was just too focused on mastering walking for a couple months. Now he's signing "milk" again sometimes and is starting to figure out "water." As far as spoken words, "Dada" has taken on a clear meaning lately. He also says "Day-Day" sometimes for Adyn and often says "Duh! duh! duh! duh!" when he has a rubber ducky. "Mama" has become less common, only coming out when he wants to nurse and I'm distracted with something else.

Evan's appetite has increased immensely in the last month or so. He never wanted to be spoon fed more than a few bites until he was ten months old and refused to be spoon fed at nine months when he was teething. Now he's much more into food, both being fed and feeding himself. Meat and cheese are probably his favorite foods right now. I'm thinking we might have to raise the grocery budget soon, and he's still nursing four times a day. 

Although Evan started walking one day shy of nine months, it took him another month to walk more than twelve steps at a time. He stopped crawling (at least 95% of the time) around eleven months and is walking very well now. He loves to run from us and be chased. Another interesting part of his physical development is he's figured out how to snap his fingers in the last month. It isn't very loud, but considering I can't snap my fingers at all (seriously) I find it crazy that my son already can. 

The night of his birthday, before I put him to bed, I was singing to Evan about how we'd had a good year and we would have even more fun in the next year. As I sang, I realized I'm really excited about having a toddler! The fact that my baby is no longer a baby really doesn't make me sad at all. I'm just looking forward to what's to come.