Beatrice, Month Ten

The tenth month has been a slow one. The excitement of simply standing has worn off for Beatrice and now she is directing all her energy towards learning to walk - but it's a slow process. Beatrice can walk now if she's holding something with at least one hand (known in baby development lingo as "cruising") and can slowly cross an entire room if there's enough contiguous furniture, but she longs to walk for real. At the playground she stares at the toddlers with naked envy.

However, even if Beatrice can't walk, she's on her way to learning to swim. We enrolled her in an infant swimming class at the Rose Bowl Aquatic Center in Pasadena and so far she loves it. The class is for ages six months to two years and divided pretty evenly between toddlers and infants. The difference, of course, is that the toddlers can follow simple directions like "turn around" and "kick your feet" whereas the infants cannot. So Beatrice mostly just floats around doing her own thing, but she's totally fearless and has a great time.

Unfortunately her fearlessness also means she is very thrill-seeking, and her new passion is trying to leap off of things. She stands up in her high chair and tries to leap out, she daily tries to jump off the changing table, and the other day she was on my bed when she made a running charge for the footboard and then flipped completely over it, laughing maniacally the entire time. Indeed, nothing makes her laugh harder than being pushed really high on the swing, going really fast in the stroller, or jumping off something really tall. She loved the (surprisingly fast-moving) carousel at Griffith Park but was somewhat bored by the slow-moving steam trains in Long Beach.

To help burn off some of this energy, I've been taking Beatrice every week to the "baby gym" with Summer St. Pierre and Amy Robb (and their sons Jack and Miller) - the Glendale public recreation center has a free weekly event where they fill the gymnasium with toys and let the babies go at it.

Developmentally, Beatrice remains very much focused on small and large motor skills - no "mamas" or "dadas" yet - but I did hear her on the baby monitor early one morning "practicing" her babbling sounds all alone. She virtually never babbles when we're around - I wonder if she's saving it up for a later debut.

As always, you can find more photos of Beatrice on Facebook and Flickr.