Two more late arrivals

Beatrice plays the piano at Lucas and Veronika's house:

Beatrice has been doing this all day long:

Beatrice, Month Eleven

This last month has been one full of adventure for Beatrice (but then what month isn't?) We took Beatrice to the Natural History Museum's annual Pavillion of Wings display, where a large mesh tent enclosure is set up on the lawn and filled with living butterflies.


But by far Beatrice's favorite new activity is World Citizen Toddler, a world music class she takes every Monday at the Treehouse in Beverly Hills. The class consists of the teacher singing songs in various foreign languages (French, Spanish, Portuguese, Zulu, and Korean, among others) and playing the guitar, drums, or flute. The babies play along on maracas, bongo drums, and tambourines, or whirl around with colored scarves.

Beatrice plays with scarves while the teacher plays the flute

All the children (ages 9 months to about 2 years) seem to enjoy the class, but I think the teacher was a little taken aback by how much Beatrice enjoys it, particularly when she crawled into the teacher's lap during the first session and just sat there grinning from ear to ear. At one point the teacher said to me, "Wow, she really likes drums, doesn't she?"

In fact, she really likes everything - carousels, petting zoos, aquariums, swimming class, music class - she's just a really enthusiastic person.

Beatrice has liked the dogs since she first noticed them at about five months old, but this month her affection for them really skyrocketed - she breaks into peals of delighted laughter whenever they enter the room. She spends much of her play time patting them and following them around. The other day she crawled into Shackleton's dog kennel, closed the door behind her, and sat there happily drinking out of his drip water bottle. She then spent the next half hour crawling into and out of the kennel so I was able to catch it on video.

Around 0:35 she drinks from the dog's water bottle.

She also attempts to eat dog food, to play with dog toys, and basically seems to think herself a puppy. Perhaps we're encouraging it because we gave her a bath with Cromwell. Both had fun; neither got very clean.

She can stand without support for brief periods (unfortunately the first time she did so it was in a public bathroom, so it's not the nicest photo background) and she's adept at cruising.

Standing (in the museum bathroom)

She's also very good at climbing, as you can see from this photo taken at the Griffith Park playground. She climbed up the entire gym set without any help from us. Unfortunately, she also likes climbing out of highchairs, shopping carts, and changing tables, making caring for her a little more challenging lately. On the plus side, the other day at Lucas and Veronika's house she learned how to crawl down stairs - a greater challenge and a more risky endeavor than climbing up them.

And finally, finally, she got her first tooth! at ten months, three weeks. She celebrated that day by eating pancakes with fresh fruit, ravioli, bread with olive tapenade, and chicken parmesan, though I don't think that one little tooth did much to assist. Her new favorite food, however, is quesadillas - not the healthiest snack but guaranteed to cheer her up no matter what.

Eating her first quesadilla

Now we're off to Chicago tomorrow to visit Aunt Mina, Uncle James, cousins Rosemary and Louis, and our friends Joanne and Stephanie before returning to prepare for Beatrice's first birthday party.

Beatrice and Miller

You can find more photos of Beatrice on Facebook and Flickr.

From the files...

These are a million years old, but I was going through my old craft photos while working on a new set of party invitations and I came across these: "welcome baby" cards I made for Mina and Sandy when they had Rosemary and Ashley, respectively. I like these! and they're easy to make, too. I should make more cut paper things in the future...

storySouth Million Writers Award

Two of my short stories were included on this year's MWA notable list!

"Hospitality" and "Third Lesson" were both on the list for best short stories published online in 2009.

And thanks to Identity Theory and Wheelhouse for publishing them.

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.