Today is little EC’s first birthday.

For her birthday, we bought her two small gourds from a farmer and sent her to bed without cake.

To be fair (to us) she loved those two little gourds that she found when we took her to a farm to see the animals and play with the plants. And she was too tired to even want cake by the time we got to that point.

She’s been an amazing traveler these past two weeks, putting up with all kinds of time in airplanes and cars, and strapped to my back, and time changes and location changes. She’s sleeping great—except for the first night of our trip, when she was way too excited to be sleeping in the same room as us—and has been eating almost all adult food for days now. She’s effectively weaned now, and her digestive system seems to have taken up cow’s milk without any trouble.

Yesterday was my first day ever to not see her at all. I got up early, went traveling for work, and got back after she was back in bed.

It is striking how quickly little EC has begun to understand commands and comply with them (when she feels like it, of course…)

She will pretty reliably pick up toys and put them back in their boxes (actually, in any box…she hasn’t associated particular boxes with particular toys yet). She will put books back on the shelf. If I ask her to get a particular book from among her 4 or 5 most-read books, she will do that too. If I ask her what sound an elephant makes, she’ll make a tiny trumpet sound. Ask how a tiger sounds, and she’ll growl. Some of these things (like the elephant sound) I’ve consciously helped her learn through positive reinforcement. Others, like learning the names of particular books, she has just picked up herself and she surprised me when I got a good response to my asking.

Thinking back, I’m almost certain that the first word she understood was “Alexa”. In a sign of the technological times, we have an Amazon Echo in her room that we used when she was very small to play soothing music when putting her to sleep. So every night, and every naptime, we’d put her down, say “Alexa, play lullabies”, and walk out. The Echo lights up when its code word is said, and then it responds to say that it’s going to play, and then it starts playing. I think she was only about three or four months old when she started to look toward the Echo whenever we said “Alexa”. That was long before we noticed her recognizing any other word.

It would be neat to make a catalogue of all the words that she understands now, but I’m sure that even after the most comprehensive efforts I’d still be missing a lot just by not thinking to ask or not understanding her responses. It’ll be far easier to figure out what words she can say when she starts speaking. I understand that the median 16-month-old has a vocabulary of some 50 words. Right now, she doesn’t say anything with the kind of intention that I would expect from actual speaking; but she’ll say “Dada” in some of the right contexts, “Mama” in some of the right contexts, and she’ll say “Hi” back to me when I greet her after her naps.