Aurick turned fourteen months on the seventh of December.
Most notable milestone for Aurick this month is the spot usually taken up in the colloquium by his playpen has now been taken up by a Christmas tree. This means I have no place to corral him in there, and he scooches where he will; usually this scooching is straight over to said tree, where he can play with the Pinocchio ornament which has been placed in his reach. He also likes to pull any presents away from the tree that he can, though that’s all he really does with them. It may be he pulls them away just to be able to reach Pinocchio better.
Of course the main anxiety now that he’s out and about is that someone will forget to close the basement door, and he will scoot over to the stairs and tumble down. He tumbled off our bed a couple of weeks ago.
He has a funny little sense of humor, and loves to do things he thinks will make you laugh. Unfortunately sometimes this is tossing things off his high chair (he watches carefully to make sure you’re watching) or throwing his pacifier aside when you’re holding him, and then you have to go searching for it.
He has a funny little guttural language that he uses to babble to himself or to you (if you seem like you’re listening.) It’s unintelligible, but it follows the intonation of a regular English sentence. It’s very familiar to me because Clive did the same thing. I mean, really all the kids have had this period where they “talk” at us, but Clive’s and Aurick’s sound so much alike. It’s just another way in which they’re so similar.
Of course the main similarity continues to be those pesky gross motor skills. Aurick is very adept now at getting around (he, like Clive and Anselm both, didn’t move at all until after his first birthday) and now I am working with him proactively on other milestones, like pulling up. One peculiarity is he hates to roll over. He can, but he doesn’t like to. So we’re working on that. (He also is freaked out by being held or tossed up in the air. I don’t remember Clive and Anselm disliking this, but Clive does now, as a nine year old, absolutely loathe carnival rides, roller coasters, etc. Anselm is the exact opposite.)
Despite his reluctance towards some movements, he does love being the Johnny-Jump-Up and can really get going in it. His favorite thing to do is to whip himself around in circles until he’s wound the cord up so tightly that his feet can barely touch the ground anymore.
He loves to play and be tickled. He really likes Anselm, who is willing to go to great lengths to get a chuckle out of Aurick. As is usually the case, the sibling closest to the baby–in this case, Beatrice–is both best friend and archenemy. They love to pal around together, but she’s also the most likely to steal whatever he’s trying to play with.
During the month before last, he worked tirelessly to achieve the ability to stack three blocks (and I do mean tirelessly). He seems to have mostly moved on from block-stacking, though he does return occasionally to practice the skill. He is very proud of himself when he does it, and always makes a triumphant “aha!” sort of sound, checking to make sure I have seen what he did.
His eating has become more picky (that pesky first birthday always ruins everything) but what he does eat he eats a lot of. We have had terrible trouble with his manners at the table, which we are working through, and seeing some improvement on. He used to scream when he was finished, and because the sound drowned out everything going on at the table, he would be removed. Well, that quickly turned into “screaming is how I tell them I want to get down”, which is never good. I started setting our egg timer at the table and would get him down (no matter how much screaming he did) when the timer went off. He learned pretty quickly that that was the new signal, and the screaming has decreased dramatically. Now when it goes off, he looks at me and raises his arms for me to get him out, then waves pleasantly at those still at the table with a cheerful “night-night!” as I take him back to his room to get him ready for bed.
I haven’t been able to completely successfully adjust his schedule to match the other kids. No matter what I do, he seems to always be up at about 6:30 a.m. Of course, that was 7:30 before the time change. I’ve given up somewhat and just put him to bed a little earlier in the evenings than I would like to. It does make it easier to put the girls to bed (since he shares with them) if the bedtimes are staggered rather than trying to get them to all settle down at once–so I really don’t have too much to complain about. As it is, he lies in bed and sings and crows and fusses until it’s time to get up. Elvie sleeps through all his noise; Beatrice gets up and sings and crows and fusses with him.
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