Since I’ve been meaning to post videos of Nora learning to crawl for about two months now (but never getting to do it), here are two months worth of video clips of her crawling progress! Ten full minutes! It starts with her just getting the idea that she can actually try to go after things and ends with her cruising across the room and down the hall. There are a few other funny little parts where she’s just making noise or doing some other cute things.
Unfortunately, while putting together the video, I had some strange and annoying problems with the sound cutting out, so I had to take out the titles and transitions to keep the sound going. This means that the dates I put in are no longer visible. The first chunk of the video you see is from the end of June, when Nora was almost 7 months old. Then when she’s wearing the sleeveless blue jumper (4:40), it’s the end of July. When Nora shows up in overalls (7:00), those clips were from the last week or so. Also, the quality of the video seems a little worse than usual. Blah. But at least it’s finally posted.
The Lane County Fair took place this past weekend, and the fairgrounds are conveniently located less than a ten minute walk from our house, so we went every day. Nora’s favorite part was definitely seeing all the different animals in the barns, but Jonah mostly loved looking at all the rides (and the daredevil flip-in-the-air motorcycle riders). The first day we went, he carefully checked out all his options and decided that his ride of the day should be the race cars. It was his very first amusement park-type ride. So off he drove…
He took his driving VERY seriously.
The next day, we chose a food treat – Jonah’s first funnel cake (and possibly his first seriously deep fried food). He was definitely a fan!
After we finished it, I showed him how to lick the extra sugar off the plate. He thought this was pretty hilarious.
The next day, Jonah chose another ride – the boats. He cruised under a few tepees and enjoyed it quite a bit.
We also stopped in the bingo tent for a minute, played one game, and walked out $12 richer, which was great because it pretty much covered the cost of rides and a funnel cake. :)
And while I circled numbers, Jonah used his crayon to draw a truck on the table. Of course.
Here’s another truck he drew recently – “a backhoe shoveling up dirt with its scoop in the back!”
The doctor advised us to start Nora on rice cereal first, even though it is totally disgusting. I remember it took Jonah months before he wanted to eat any kind of cereal, and even then he only liked it with fruit mixed in. But we gave it a try with Nora anyway. She was quite pleased to be sitting up in the high chair. Poor little girl… she had no idea what was about to happen.
After batting the spoon away a few times, a tiny bit made it past her lips.
Her initial reaction:
It didn’t get any better from there.
She definitely did not even swallow a total of a spoonful, and was pretty well horrified by the attempts, so I let her see if she just wanted to play with the cereal. At first she was curious.
But then she was just as disgusted as she was when it was near her mouth.
On Monday, Nora’s first tooth popped through – one of the front bottom ones. (The one right next to it came through today.) She’s been drooling like crazy for a week or so, so this was not unexpected. It’s also almost the exact age that Jonah got his first tooth. Now that these teeth are coming through, she is constantly sticking out her tongue to chew on it.
This is Nora’s teething face. :)
And completely unrelated… This morning, Jonah asked Sean to write him a message on the easel before he went to work, but then Jonah decided that he wanted to write the ‘love, Dad’ part himself.
This may be a little long, as there have been a lot of developments that I’ve known I should be writing down somewhere, but haven’t, so I’m going to do it now. For as long as I can remember, at least from when he was 15 months old, Jonah’s been very interested in letters and words. At that time, he could identify about a dozen letters and their sounds. He’s always had a great attention span for books and loves having stories read to him. By 19 months, he was speaking in sentences and by his second birthday, he used hundreds if not over a thousand words.
Most of the first words he learned to recognize in print had something to do with trucks or the names of the people in our family. He knew what ‘dig,’ ‘dump,’ and ‘stop,’ looked like in specific places, like on a red stop sign or on certain pages of his favorite books. Then, back in December, Jonah started pointing out ‘stop’ on our clothes dryer or other street signs. He picked out a library book we had never read before and told me it was called, ‘Dig!’ (which it was). He also started trying to write his name, and happily personally signed about forty of our Christmas cards.
About two months ago, Jonah started talking about what letters he thought words started with. He’d say the word really slowly and then say the letter that made the sound he heard. I asked him to bring me Nora’s diaper once and he was saying ‘diaper, diaper, diaper,’ and then said, “Diaper has a D, and a P, and a R in it!” When we’d read him a book, he’d point to a word and try to figure out which word went with one of the things we said based on the first letter. The alphabet refrigerator magnets started getting a lot of use while I was making meals, and he loves making really long ‘words’ with crazy strings of letters and asking me what they say, while he laughs hysterically. He also really started to play around with rhyming words, noticing them in songs and in things he said. With Mr. Potato Head, he said, ‘That’s where the nose goes. Hey! Nose and goes rhyme!” – things like that.
Then over the past month, he’s moved from just recognizing words to figuring out how to sound things out on his own and has just really taken off! The first time he really surprised me was when we were driving and he said, ‘That sign says ‘bump’ because it looks like ‘dump,’ but it has a B, so it says ‘bump!'” I usually try to read some of the newspaper while we eat breakfast (yeah, good luck with that, Mom) and he constantly is pointing out words and phrases that he knows – “That says, ‘End of the Road!'” “f-o-r says for” “A Bark Bark Sale! That’s pretty funny!” (an ad for a mulch supplier) “Ducks win!” “That says ‘Hiker’!” and on and on. When we get new library books, he helps me read them the first time through, both recognizing words and sounding out new ones.
He asks questions all the time about what words say – everywhere we go – and what unfamiliar words mean when he hears them in conversations or on the radio. He’s noticed things like exclamation marks and wants to know what that ‘funny looking upside-down i is.’ Now whenever he sees them in his books, he tries to yell the words. The other day, he sat in his room with the ukulele and made up a song that said, “The E at the end of the word doesn’t make a sound. No, no, no, it doesn’t make a sound.”
Every time we go somewhere, it’s like the letters and words are just jumping out at him. He picks out all sorts of words he knows while we walk around the grocery store, drive in the car, and notices all sorts of little things that look like letters, like the lines that mark parking spots on the side of the road ‘look like lowercase t’s.’ Jonah points out random swirls on our carpet that really do look like lowercase e’s. He likes to bite his food into letter shapes, make letters out of stick pretzels, and just tonight was writing ‘Hi’ with spaghetti.
In this video, he starts off making some words with letter cookies. Then I caught a little of him drawing letters on his chalkboard (his favorite place to write) and had him show off his word spinner which I copied from a similar wooden one I saw online. Finally, he labels a fire truck I drew for him, something he did totally on his own a day or two ago, and I asked him to do it again for me.
It has been so fun to watch how his brain works as he tries so hard to figure out this big reading puzzle. The kid loves words!
