Daniel is now 11 1/2 months old.
Our friends Ruth, Tim, Eleanor and Peter gave us a Fisher Price walker at the weekend – the kind babies can stand up and push along – if they can stand up and push it along, that is. Daniel wriggled as I took him out of the buggy in the garden yesterday afternoon, crawled across the grass, grabbed the handle and stood up. He was off, trundling along, stiffed legged, but definitely walking, and pushing. So another milestone whizzes past – first day he walked, on his great-grandmother’s birthday – 87 years young.
He has also learned to turn round at the top of the two steps in the hall and go down backwards. For a long time, he would crawl towards them at full speed, stop, carefully feel the edge of the step with his hand, then turn round and head back the way he had come. Often he would drop a piece of duplo or a ball over the edge then look wistfully down at it, unable to reach it. Not anymore.
He points at all sorts of things in sky with his little bent finger and says ‘bee’ loudly. Maybe he’s noticing the clouds or the sun or the leaves on the trees or the aeroplanes or the birds or he can feel the wind in his hair.
I was standing talking to a friend in the street yesterday and the lady giving away free newspapers started waving and smiling. I smiled back. She kept waving – rather odd, I thought. Then I realised that Daniel was waving at her enthusiastically. He kept it up through-out our conversation – a good ten minutes.
He loves to be chased and caught. If I come after him he crawls away as fast as he can until he has to collapse onto his bottom and be picked up, laughing.
I have just stopped writing to go and fetch Daniel from the sitting room. He was sitting by the cupboard, pointing and saying ‘ba’. What could it be? We both got down on our hands and knees and peered underneath (Daniel got down on his tummy too). There was his tennis ball, right at the back. ‘Ba?’ he said, looking at me. ‘Ba.’ So I rescued the ball and then we sat in the corridor rolling it back and forward to each other.
Now I’m back – but not for long. There’s far to much too do when you’re almost one to be waiting around while I try to write. Off we go on another mini-adventure.