Summer and Company: 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.