Yesterday little EC turned 11 months. She celebrated by kind-of-mastering a new skill: standing up. She’s still not quite there, but yesterday, during her time trials, she logged an impressive and still-not-beaten 20 seconds of free standing. You can see in her eyes that she totally gets it. She just needs to get her feet and legs in tune with what she already knows.

As though for a late month-birth-day present, I got to check out her damaged tooth today (she was still enough for long enough for me to do it) and lo, I saw nothing out of the ordinary. So she still has a raw lip where she broke it open, but the tooth looks perfectly normal, with all the discoloration that I noticed two days ago just…gone. Not sure just why that happened, but I’m grateful. And, having had to clear her mouth of several things that she stuffed in it today, I can attest that her bite is just as strong as it ever was.

I have hated since the beginning that we live in a place with all tile floors, and ever since little EC became mobile I’ve tried various strategies to keep her in padded areas so that she can learn to move without damaging herself. But once she got enough practice and got pretty good at moving about, I’ve loosened up and let her explore. Today, though, she took a very short fall (no more than three or four inches) and faceplanted into the tile.

She has hit her chin like that before, and there was no problem beyond the initial crying. Today, though, she must have fallen right on one of her new teeth. She has a little bit of a bloody upper lip—not even enough for the blood to flow, though. So it wasn’t obvious that anything else had happened, until she started smiling again and we could see that one of her two front teeth was discolored where it meets the gums. It’s hard to tell if it’s all a tooth discoloration, or if it’s also a gum discoloration…she really won’t let us take much of a look at it. The tooth isn’t loose, and biting with it doesn’t seem to cause her any pain (as my finger learned while probing).

Apparently this sort of thing commonly causes a tooth to completely discolor, and it may or may not go back to being white. Baby teeth can recover, whereas adult teeth more often die and have to be removed. Because it wasn’t much of a hit, we’ll keep an eye on it and see if the discoloration spreads or if she has any more pain. We haven’t taken her to the dentist, since it sounds like they would just prescribe the same course of action. If she has any other problems at all, we’ll take her in.

I suspect that we have not seen the last of tile-related injuries.

Little EC decided yesterday to practice her standing-alone. So she crawled over to me, climbed up my knee or shoulder, stood, let go, and fell. Most of the time she was only up a second or two, just long enough that inertia, not balance, gets the credit for keeping her up. But one time, for a delicious five seconds, I saw her wobble back and forth on her little feet, clearly using her muscles to offset gravity, and she officially balanced on her own for the first time. Having done that, she went back to playing her other games and didn’t try again. I suspect that in a few days’ time she’ll be up for good.

Little EC has a new trick: pretending. She doesn’t have a huge repertoire, but she does what she knows best: eating.

I noticed it first with a teething ring, earlier last week. She wasn’t teething, but she saw it in the fridge and wanted it, so I let her play around with it. I noticed that she’d stick it in her mouth, bite a bit, then take it out and pucker her lips in a chewing motion. Satisfied with her imaginary bite, she’d stick it back in and chew on another “bite”.

Then I noticed that she’d do the same thing with little “things” on the floor. Maybe because she always gets a reaction out of me when she picks things up and puts them in her mouth, I’ve noticed that she’s now grabbing onto things that aren’t there, shoving her fingers in her mouth, and then looking at me while “chewing”. Too bad, kid. I’ve got you figured out.

I can’t get complacent, though. This afternoon she really did stuff some large, hard, unidentifiable mass into her mouth that she found in the communal play room, and I had to force it out of her. I always wonder what’s worse, whatever bugs she might pick up from whatever that thing was, or the ones that she picks up from my finger—the one that’s been handling all the communal toys—in her mouth. At any rate, choking is worse than both.

In other news, I’m playing games with her to encourage her to identify colors and shapes. She’s a rank amateur, but from time to time she will pick correctly when I ask her to give me the red thing, or point to the circle. I just array things out in front of her, one by one point and name each one, and when I’m done, start asking her questions. She’s generally best when tired, but not too tired. Excess energy, and she just wants to pick things up and play with them; too little energy, and she refuses. There is a sweet spot where she’s pretty good.

She’s also expert at memory games. I’ll let her see me put a small piece of a cookie under one of three colored pinch bowls that we have in the kitchen, and then I’ll mix them up. She’s sharp enough to realize that the order of the bowls on the table doesn’t determine where the cookie is; rather, it’s the color that matters. She’s much better at this game than any of the others. On a completely unrelated note, she also really, really likes cookies.

Without any encouragement from me, little EC has decided that it’s time to let go, and let the cards (and her diaper-cushioned buns) fall where they may. She really wants to stand on her own, and not one week after first climbing to a standing position, she’s making the push to the next achievement. She hasn’t figured out the balance thing, but she has learned that if she asks for my hand, I’ll give it, and she can keep herself up as long as she want by holding my fingers. Today, she also learned that it was fun to fall back into a ball pit, which we have in the little communal play room in our complex.

She also performed a new stunt for Empirical Mom tonight. Instead of shoving her face into the blanket to go to sleep, she decided for the first time to pull up to standing position in the crib. Tomorrow morning, I will probably go in to find her bouncing, just like the five little monkeys in the story that we read her every day before putting her down.

It was so hot out today when I took her for a walk, that when we saw some friends in the swimming pool, and they offered a spare swimming diaper to EC, I accepted, put it on her, and we just jumped—me fully clothed—into the pool. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen EC happier. I think I hadn’t realized just how miserable she was in the heat.