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.

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.

It’s been three days since little EC turned 10 months, and four days since I first noticed her stand up on her own by propping herself up on something. She prefers low boxes that she can put her hands down on from a crouching position, instead of railings or other things that she would have to reach up for and pull. She braces her hands, pulls one foot up, and then pushes with hands and foot until the other foot gets up. At that point she’s doing a plank, and she usually will walk that in until she’s almost standing upright.

Just today, she started taking my offered hand (holding only my thumb; I guess she wants something she can grip completely) and letting go of her box. Then she’s standing straight up, with only my hand keeping her balanced; and she’ll do this until she realizes she doesn’t know how to get down. Then she’ll go back to the box or perhaps I’ll let her drop backward slowly so she gets the idea. All in all, she has great fun with that.

She’s also now quite adept at putting things away if asked. We started with blocks, but we’ve moved on to stuffed animals, other toys, and just today, successfully, books. She can actually re-file a book in its shelf; and if she’s lucky, it’ll be somewhat correctly oriented. Also, she’s decided to start taking the books out one at a time, rather than just pulling them all out. And when she wants it read, she turns and hands it to me.

We’ve also just started enjoying a game where we sit on opposite sides of a little foam arch that’s in our clubhouse. We can see each other both under the arch and over the arch. Then we get a ball or some other toy, and she passes it to me under the arch, and I put it on top of the arch for her to grab, and then we continue this for as long as she thinks it’s fun, which can be quite some time.

The number of things that she’s getting a handle on all at once is pretty amazing.

The new fun games this week in the Empirical household have mostly to do with putting things in other things and taking them out again. In our toy area, little EC has some balls and a little bowl (a kitchen implement about whose use I’m ignorant, so it became a toy). She enjoys taking the balls (particularly, the tennis ball…forget about all those balls made specifically for babies) and putting them in the bowl, then taking them out again…and again…and again. We also made a fun game out of picking up all her wooden blocks and putting them in the box where they belong. Once into this game, little EC would not be deterred from finding all the blocks scattered in the play area and returning them to their rightful place.

But in her mind, the books still do not belong on the shelf. They belong scattered all over the floor.

We had gates installed this week, at the top and bottom of the stairs, and across the entrance to the play area. I consider the stair gates a necessity. One wrong move, and a fall down a flight of tile stairs could easily be lethal. As much as I’d like to just take the time to teach her to be responsible on the stairs, those consequences are just too much to ignore. I’m a little more ambivalent about the one cordoning off the play area. I like the idea that she should be able to crawl around and explore…why should the rest of the house be off limits?…but I also like the idea of being able to walk away for a minute and not worry about where she will end up, especially once she starts moving faster. The entire gate can be attached and removed easily, so at least we have the option.

I also installed some foam padding along a particularly egregious corner in the play area. The funny thing is, now that she’s been playing there for months, and has hit her head on the corner a few times already, she’s cautious enough that she avoids the corner anyway, even when it looks like she’s focusing on something else. Sometimes, oddly, she will crawl up to it and gently place her head against it, as though she’s making sure it’s still there. So maybe the padding isn’t such a great idea…maybe she’ll forget about being cautious.

She also likes doing what I call “baby yoga”, which consists mostly of a downward dog-style pose. She’s getting very close to pushing her legs vertical, but always with her hands on the floor. She still shows no particular inclination to climb to a standing position.

I just kind of casually said that little EC had started crawling the day after her 9th month; and as predicted, we lost containment soon thereafter. Being newly self-locomotive, she is now able to explore anything that she wants (within reason—my reason—that is). I find it funny that she very intently goes after some things (the shoe rack; must pull out and examine all the shoes) and completely ignores other things (plenty of picture frames on the floor or an easy pull up the ottoman).

I’m guessing it’s because she is now able to explore on her own that she’s becoming more aware of her surroundings. On Saturday, she did something new for the first time: she saw a lizard perched on the wall, and while staring at it, she pointed to it. Like she wanted us to see what she was seeing. As an extension, today for the first time she took notice by herself of some flowers on the bushes outside, and pointed to them with the very clear intent that she wanted to be taken over to examine them. I think this would be classified under “social skills”: her actions have predictable impact on the actions of others (me).

In gross motor skill news, she now enjoys perching on her knees unaided by handholds, and pushing buttons. She’s not uniformly good at the button part yet, but good enough to keep her coming back.