Boo

Nicole, 11 months

If you asked me what Allison’s first word was, I’d probably say it was ‘yes’.  At least that’s the first word I remember her saying clearly and understandably.  She probably said quite a few words before that, but since I didn’t write them down, I have long since forgotten.

To avoid such uncertainty with Nicole, let it be known that her first word is “boo”.  As in ‘peek-a-boo’.  Sure, it sounds more like ‘buh,” but we all know what she means.  The first time she said it, Allison was lying under our bed.  She was playing peek-a-boo with Nicole by occasionally popping her head out from under the dust ruffle.  If Allison didn’t pop out fast enough, Nicole would yell “boo!” emphatically until she reappeared.

Nicole has recently added another word to her vocabulary:  “Allison”.  To the untrained ear it sounds a lot like, “AAAAAAAhhhh,” but once again, her intentions are clear.  Most mornings, Allison likes to accompany me to Nicole’s room when she wakes up, and Nicole is always delighted to see her.  When Allie is not with me, Nicole whips her head around on the diaper changer while shouting, “AAAAHHHHhhh?”  This continues all the way down the stairs until Nicole spots Allison, at which point she grins and pumps her little arms up and down.  Perhaps she is trying to wave; it’s hard to tell.  That particular gesture looks a lot like the cheerio dance.

In other news: Nicole is eleven months old today!  She claps.  She waves.  She dances.  She started crawling right around 10 months, and she has become quite proficient at it.  She zips around, her hands and knees slapping noisily against the wood floors so that we can always hear her coming.  She pulls herself up on everything, and she recently started letting go.  She can stand unassisted for all of a half a second before she falls on her bottom, grinning and obviously pleased with herself.

Nicole now has 8 teeth, four on top and four on bottom.  She uses them to help keep cheerios inside her mouth and to chew on teethers, stuffed animals, wooden table legs and the occasional finger.  I wish I could say she used them to eat ‘real’ food, but until today she refused to eat anything but pureed baby food and dry cheerios.  Today, she scarfed down half an oatmeal cookie, which I assume she enjoyed.  She was pretty sad when it was gone.

Her two favorite games are “get the teether” and “This time I will beat you to the stairs.”  “Get the Teether” is Allison’s brain child.  Allie hurls a teether across the room and Nicole crawls toward it as fast as she can while giggling hysterically.  Rinse.  Repeat.

“This time I will beat you to the stairs” is slightly more complicated.  Nicole waits for me to be sufficiently distracted at the computer before taking off toward the stairs.  About half-way there, she stops and looks at me expectantly until I turn around and tell her, “No, Nicole.  No stairs.”  Then she squeals with glee and races the rest of the way to the bottom of the steps, laughing mischeviously until I scoop her up.  The game ends with a few good arm pumps, which I think in this case means either, “I’m ready for my victory cheerio” or “I WIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIN!!”