Thirteen months.

I am, again, struck by how fast time goes and how quickly everything changes. A few months ago Ingrid was practicing her pincer grip and worked hard to pick up pieces of fruit from the table. Now she’s so good at it that it no longer impresses us at all, even when she is picking up teensy pieces of slippery fruit. We were talking to another parent the other day, and he confirmed what we’ve noticed: you are so aware of the things that are going on right now, but all the previous months (and years) just melt together into a jumble. Your child is doing things today that she wasn’t doing when she was born… but it’s so hard to remember when she learned it. Which is why I’m glad I’m stopping to take stock once a month.

Over here, table skills have been progressing recently, mostly because of Ingrid’s aversion to being spoon-fed (unless the stuff we spoon-feed her is particularly yummy). Everything tastes better when it is she who holds the spoon. But spoons are tricky, and food often slides off before the spoon hits the mouth, so she hasn’t been eating much spoon food. (Forks are easier, as long as I stick the fork in the food.) Instead she has been sharing the most finger-friendly parts of our food, and eating quite a lot of bread, cheese and fruit. She has a surprisingly mature palate: I have offered her quite strongly-flavoured sauces, aniseed-flavoured bread and garlicky things, fully expecting her to spit them out, but she has eaten them and asked for more. Most recent favourite: mandarins. Hard to eat without teeth, but she persists, because they taste so good. Now she’s taken to spitting out the chewed-out pieces. The same goes for raisins: she loves the taste and is happy to stuff lots of them in her mouth, and keep them there for a long time, but she can’t chew them enough to be able to swallow them so after a while they come back out.

The habit of putting all kinds of non-food things in her mouth is getting weaker, but some things still have to be tasted. She seems to be particularly fond of small pebbles.

Right now Ingrid is most interested in things that contain other things. The stacking cups remain popular, and so does the shape sorter, as do drawers and boxes, and our suitcases, and her changing bag. She was most happy when she got the chance to empty the pack of disposable nappies we bought while on holiday, pulling them out one by one, and the pack of nappy sacks is almost as good. Some of these are one-way activities because she has no idea how to get the things back in, but with others she definitely makes an effort to put them back. Chaos is no longer her guiding principle. Mealtimes often end with her picking food carefully from one bowl to another, or from bowl to table and table to bowl. And when she pulls down shampoo bottles from the edge of the bath tub (which she is much less interested in than she used to be) she also tends to put them back. Likewise I think she has just started to discover that blocks can be used to build (placing one on top of the other) and not just to demolish.

She is also just figuring out that objects can have effects other than just loud noises. We don’t have any toys that flash lights or make noises when you push a button, but she is showing great interest in light switches when I use them, and she has noticed that interesting things happen when I squeeze her bath toys so she is working hard at emulating that. The effects are pretty unpredictable since she hasn’t understood that the bubbles and/or squirts of water come out from one particular part of the toy.

She has learned to wave bye-bye and wave hello to people, and to say hello (which sounds like a hybrid of hello and hej). The timing is a bit random, both with the waving and the hellos, but it’s clear that she has understood the general type of situation where that sort of behaviour is expected.

Apart from the hellos Ingrid isn’t saying much. I guess the confusion of three languages may be a bit too much for her to untangle. She has, however, picked up pappa (since Eric has spent quite a bit of time practicing that). When we get up early in the morning, and I later tell her that we can now go in to pappa and wake him, she gets all excited!

And she is making a lot of noises. She tends to pick a combination of sounds and then repeat that for a while, almost identically. Then do something else, and then maybe go back to that sound again several hours later. Most recently she was experimenting with pitch: saying äi with a very distinctive falling tone, again and again.

But I get the impression that she hasn’t figured out the language = communication link yet. She doesn’t use words. She likes making sounds, and knows that certain sounds go with certain situations or things. But she isn’t saying pappa when she wants to go to daddy, or making a certain kind of sound when she wants food. That kind of wish is still just signalled by a generic complaining screech. (On the other hand, she now knows exactly what to do when she wants milk: pull up my t-shirt. Very clear signals there.)

The other big baby milestone, walking, also remains just out of reach. Or rather, I think it is within her reach but she just doesn’t know it. Given how fast she is toddling around with her Wheely Bug, and how unstable that thing is, I am pretty sure that she could pick up walking within a few days if she tried, but she is too cautious to try walking without support. Sometimes she lets go with both hands because she needs them for other, more urgent things, but then as soon as she realises what’s happened – oh no, no hands! – she quickly grabs hold of something, or sits down, just in case.