Eleven Months

Eleven months! I’ve decided that observing the eleven-month mark is a bit like celebrating your 45th reunion. It’s a nice milestone and all, but everyone knows in the back of their minds that the 50th is right around the corner, so they’re kind of holding their enthusiasm in reserve until then.

Actually, that’s just kind of the lame excuse I’m giving for the disjointed brevity of this post. This month I totally failed to be disciplined about jotting down some notes about the events and activities that characterized it, which means I can’t actually remember anything that occurred prior to roughly the last two days of Month Eleven, and even those are getting mixed up in my head with the first couple days of Month Twelve.

I do recall that the biggie this month was that Eloise started walking. One day she started taking a few intentional steps between objects, and two days later she could walk across the room. It’s crazy! She walks with her hands way up in the air, and it’s so cute I hope she never stops. She might look funny walking up to get her diploma at graduation, but I don’t care.

Julian is not walking yet, but we can tell that seeing Eloise walk is giving him ideas. In fact, we’ve noticed that they’re both getting much better at observing what the other one is doing and then following suit. For example, Julian loves to stand at the wooden cradle in the living room and rock it back and forth with ever greater vigor and enthusiasm. When Eloise sees him do this, she invariably walks or crawls over and joins him in the same activity. (This is kind of a problem when the toy in question is not quite so large and shareable as the cradle — we have lots of toy-stealing issues these days, and so often they both seem to want to occupy the exact same point in space.) In the tub, if one splashes, the other splashes (incidentally, two splashing babies is not an insignificant amount of splashing). When one claps, the other claps. If I put an object on one baby’s head, the other baby immediately tries to put a nearby object onto his or her own head. To my dismay, Julian seems to be modifying his laugh to sound more like Eloise’s: now, instead of delighting us with his delicious belly laugh, he, too, sounds like a hyperventilating donkey.

That said, of course their distinct personalities continue to emerge. Eloise is sharp and intense and Julian is sweet and goofy. The other day while playing with them I had a couple of moments that I thought illustrated their differences. First, Eloise was playing her favorite new game: I would hold out my hand and say, “Can you give the ball to Mama?” She would almost put the ball in my hand but then whisk it away, looking mischievous and pleased with herself. My daughter the trickster. She can’t wave or point, but she can deceive.

A moment later, I was attempting to play catch with Julian, rolling a ball back and forth. After rolling it over to him, I held out my hands and said, “Can you throw the ball back to Mama?” And Julian, without hesitating, crawled all the way across the room to me, placed the ball gently in my hands, and sat back and looked at me with his big sweet eyes. (I then gave him a high five. Julian is great at high fives.)

One other new skill that the babies have developed is, erm, the ability to sit still and watch television for a few minutes. Yes, I admit it: we let the children watch roughly 20 minutes of TV per day (usually not all in a row), and it is the greatest. The luxury of knowing we will be able to make their breakfast or dinner without them standing at the gate to the kitchen and wailing is a wonderful new development. We TiVo Blue’s Clues and pop on an episode for a few minutes every now and then. Sometimes it backfires, because Matt and I are so mesmerized by the dorkiness of the host(s) that we will sit right next to the babies, slack-jawed, completely forgetting about whatever it was we’d planned to do while the babies were occupied by the TV. I know, the American Academy of Pediatrics says no “screen media” until age 2, but until the AAP is offering its members up for free babysitting, I am going to violate their strict standard a few minutes a day, and I’m not afraid to admit it. (I will disclaim that I hope never to get to the point where I’m allowing my kids to watch lots and lots of TV.)

Right at the end of the eleventh month we endured a family rite of passage: we all got sick within a few days of each other. Luckily it seemed to be only a mild cold, and we can’t really complain because we have been incredibly fortunate to have suffered relatively little sickness in the Sparvey household in the last year. We’re all very glad to be on the mend, if slightly apprehensive about the repeat performances that are likely in the coming months. As a side note, we did discover that blowing one’s nose in Julian’s presence makes him go into full, instant meltdown. A long, slow, intake of breath followed by a long, slow, wide-mouthed wail with giant tears rolling down his cheeks. It’s bizarre and, I will admit in bad-mother fashion, kind of hilarious.

So that’s a sliver of life at eleven months. Back in my eight-month post, I talked about my friend Melissa coming by with her 11.5-month-old daughter, and how I couldn’t believe how much more advanced Abi was than Julian and Eloise. Now here we are at that point (almost), and quite honestly it’s hard to remember a time when they weren’t pulling up and cruising and putting plastic bowls on their heads. I know they are changing fast, but when I try to think back on what they were like just three months ago — what made them so different then that I couldn’t believe how old Abi seemed in comparison — I can’t remember them doing less. Then, of course, I’ll watch a video from a few months back, and I’ll be stunned by how different they were. (I recently remarked with some alarm to Matt, when we watched a video from month 2 or so, “What’s wrong with them? Why aren’t they doing anything?”) I know that three months from now I’ll feel the same way — I’ll look back on this time and I won’t be able to believe how far they’ve come since, without my even noticing it. And then three months after that. And then three months after that.

But that’s getting ahead of myself. Onward to the one-year mark, after which I have been assured that life will become easy and carefree. Whee!

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