Month 13 highlights

This month it became very clear that Semra has a lot of opinions and a strong desire to communicate them. She started the month off by shaking her head no. Do you want water? Shakes her head no. Do you want to put your pants on? Shakes her head no. Do you want to read a book? Stares intently at book (yes…?). We weren’t sure at first if she actually meant no since sometimes she would say no to water and then grab the glass of water (maybe it’s more like the Sri Lankan head wobble?). But we treated it as a “no” and soon she started expressing “yes” by pointing. She can also understand so much of what we are saying now. She understands it when we say no, or when we ask her to come, or ask her to turn on the light. She gets it right when we ask her to point “where’s my nose?” or “where’s Dad?” It’s pretty amazing!

Her memory is getting better too. She loves to read and has a shelf of books. She now picks out her favorite books for us to read to her. At the moment her favorite books include: Hop on Pop, That’s Not My Dinosaur, Very Hungry Caterpillar, Bear on a Bike, and Global Babies. She also loves to eat, especially fruit (bananas, oranges, blueberries, pears), and bread and avocado.

She is a very active baby, though still not walking. She loves to climb and tumble. We started taking her to music classes – which she has very little interest in. After music class she gets to play on the jungle gym and that’s what she really enjoys. She finds the steepest slide and climbs up it. Her other new favorite activity is going for rides inside of our laundry basket. We also made her homemade play dough, but she had no interest in it (I was impressed by how great the play dough was!). At day care she loves to paint so we made her some edible paints which was fun.

We are also continuing our monthly date night swap with Soleil and that it so wonderful. It’s so fun to have the two girls over and so fun to go out on the town with our friends to SAM Remix.