Thirteen Months

After the fanfare of the 12-month mark, this subsequent monthly update is bound to feel rather lackluster and anti-climactic. But in fact, the month was not at all lackluster: it was busy and fun and challenging.

The excitement of the first birthday festivities was quickly followed by the excitement of Halloween. It didn’t start out well: the babies were none too thrilled to be woken up from naps, stuffed into hot, cheap, polyester fleece costumes, and carted into my office to be shown off at the annual “Goosebumps” party to which the children of all employees are invited. Let’s just say that when the head of HR distributed the photos of adorable be-costumed children frolicking merrily at the party, Julian and Eloise were notably absent.

Things improved on Halloween itself, however. Our good friends Ilissa and Dave came to visit with their darling three-month-old son, Ethan, and we dressed all the babies up and took them on a late-afternoon stroll around the neighborhood. We returned home to greet the torrents of trick-or-treaters, and a torrent it was – the street was packed with children and parents. It was a very warm night, so we brought the babies outside to witness the action, and Eloise seemed to be electrified by all the activity. She ran laps up and down the street for as long as we would let her, trying to climb the stairs on the neighbors’ front stoops, weaving in and out of the throng of trick-or-treaters.

Month thirteen was a challenge because both babies were sick nearly the entire time. While neither had H1N1, their illnesses seemed to add up to a sort of deconstructed swine flu: first they each had a cold with some respiratory symptoms, then they moved on to a nasty gastro-intestinal virus, and finally they rounded things out with a 48-hour flirtation with high fever. They took turns — always Julian first — and while I think it was probably easier that they never were both very sick at the same time, it certainly was a long few weeks. Matt and I managed to stay healthy, mercifully, but this glimpse of the non-stop illness that comes with having young kids in winter has left us a bit apprehensive about what’s ahead.

Developmentally, the babies seem to be gaining receptive language at a rapid clip. This feels like a momentous change: now, whatever I say to them, there’s at least some slight chance that they’re going to derive some glimmer of understanding from it! I know that doesn’t sound like much, but after a year in which their knowledge of English words was inferior to that of the cats, it’s a huge improvement.

What they aren’t doing much of is talking. Both babies can say “Dada” pretty reliably, but that’s it. Eloise says “hi,” her catch-all syllable for “this object is interesting to me,” nearly incessantly, and won’t say anything at all if you prompt her with something like, “Can you say ‘kitty’?” Julian, on the other hand, responds to that prompt with a pause and then a jubilant “Dada!” It’s kind of adorable. “Julian, can you say ‘kitty’?” Pause. “Dada!” “Julian, can you say ‘Mama’?” Pause. “Dada!” We aren’t worried about their lack of verbal giftedness, because they seem so engaged and communicative now even without words (and they continue to love books, racing over and sitting down attentively when they hear the word “read”), so we know that language will come with time.

One area that has seen some advancement at last is Eloise’s hair growth. She has progressed from complete baldie, to John Stamos on Full House (weird on top, long in back), to David Bowie in Labyrinth (really weird on top, really long in back). Okay, those are exaggerations, but that’s the impression that she gives me. Things seem to be picking up in that area, and it’s sort of nice to imagine how she’ll look in a few months with a regular head of hair. (Julian, on the other hand, is starting to look scruffy, and our first baby haircut is on the horizon, though Matt is in denial about this.)

There’s no question that the 13-month milestone feels different to me than the others. Each previous one felt momentous for one reason or another, especially since they seemed to be counting down to the one-year mark. And now the first birthday has come and gone, and the monthly milestones feel less like hurdles cleared, less like goals attained, and more like small signposts marking off the passage of everyday life. That said, the babies are still changing all the time, and the changes now are even more interesting to me than the changes in the first year (I remember that the changes from month one to month two were mostly things like a reduction in the amount of grunting they did in their sleep). So it’s nice to pause and regularly reflect on how fast and how far they come each month. (In a nutshell: Fast. And far.)

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