Our child has twenty teeth. Yes, all four pre-molars. Yes, all four two-year molars. Yes, he is an early teether. I am so relieved that this is over, because now we have a break from tooth-related crankiness for at least three years until the incisors get loose and/or he starts sprouting six-year molars at the age of four. Phew!
He may, however, be the only baby in the history of ever to complete his pediatric dental capacity before learning to walk. We’re still working on that one.
Because of Simon’s congenital hypotonia (reduced ability to initiate and sustain muscular contraction), walking has been a challenge. For whatever reason, he’s not super interested in walking by himself, and (because of that?) his core muscles are weak, making independent standing and walking extra hard and extra unappealing. So we’ve been forcing him to walk (holding our hands) around the house, which hasn’t been very popular, but it is working. My goal is to have him walking by his second birthday in about two months. Go, Simon, go!
In other news, Simon has really taken an interest in Play-doh. His Auntie Kimb gave him a set of ten mini dough-cans for Christmas. Like his mother, Simon his very taken by collections of identical items of different colors, so he frequently spots the play-doh box and asks to play with it. Until tonight, though, he was kind of averse to actually touching the dough itself, but one by one, Simon asked us to take out every color of play-doh, so eventually, we had all of them out on the table, and Todd and I started making cubes and spheres (and tetrahedra) out of them. Because we’re nerds.
And then Simon saw the white sphere. And he started signing “egg.” And I just about fell out of my chair. He knows what eggs are (from his “Magritte’s Imagination” board book, where they are shown in hard-white-ovate form, and also from the breakfast table, where they are soft and yellow scrambled things). He can point at “egg” in his book, and he will sign for “eggs” at the table, but I’d never seen him sign “egg” for the hard-white-still-in-the-shell thing. So maybe I’m the only one floored by this, but it was a kind of mental leap I hadn’t seen him execute before. Next week: the calculus.
In other abstract-communication news: At some point, Simon learned or made up a sign for “bib” without cluing me in. One afternoon he and I were home from work and day-care, sitting on the kitchen floor eating corn chips (which is a semi-regular occurrence, don’t judge), and he started making some sign (very insistently), and I had no idea what he was asking for. I told him I didn’t know what he wanted. So he crawled over to the drawer where we keep his bibs and pointed at it, said “Mama!” and made the sign again. So I put a bib on him, fed him dinner, and he ate up all his food, poor hungry thing.
While Simon’s still not talking, really, he has gotten more interested in imitating our sounds. As I was undressing him for his bath tonight, he heard Todd start running the bath water, and he got really excited and signed “bath”. I said “ba-ba-ba! Bath!” He looked at me like I was stupid. “Your turn!” I said “ba-ba-ba!” He looked at me as though to say “Oh! My turn!” and started saying “ba-ba-ba!” Of course, he wouldn’t repeat it for Todd, but he sure was proud of himself for saying it the right way.
He was also really proud of himself, and extremely delighted, because he kept tooting as I was undressing him for his bath. Honestly. It’s like he’s a little boy or something.
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