Ten months this Tuesday.

There have been lots of changes every month, of course, but this past month it feels like Ingrid has really blossomed. Was it the vacation, perhaps, with all the new people and places, the crawling in the grass, the extra attention? It seems like she has suddenly learned to think more.

There’s no one major thing she’s learned to do, but a lot of small ones. Clapping her hands. Crawling around obstacles rather than trying to go straight over them. Trying a lot more varied facial expressions and speech-like sounds. (I believe that in the last few days she has just learned to say “mmme” or “mmma” for “emme”. She doesn’t seem to differentiate between myself and Eric yet, we’re both “emme”.)

She is spending more and more time standing, holding on to whatever she can. She also practices standing up and sitting down a lot, as well as squats, which look like hard work. She is less picky about her choice of support – while she would previously only accept something steady (such as a chair), wobbly and flimsy things (such as trouser legs) will now do as well, or even just a wall. When she finds something good to hold on to, she is now happy to let go with one hand, maybe look over her shoulder, and even walk longer distances, not just a few steps – back and forth along the bookshelf or the edge of a garden deck, for example.

We have tried a number of new activities, including bicycle trips, playing with sand (both in a sandbox and on the beach), and swinging on a playground swing. Likewise a range of new “toys” have been explored, and new uses found for old toys. Toys that can be banged against the floor have been particularly popular. Not everything goes straight into the mouth: rattles can be rattled, book pages can be turned, and paper can be torn in pieces before being stuffed in the mouth.

Due to all this exploring we’ve also had our first case of baby damage. Ingrid explored a paper lamp and the lamp was seriously (but not fatally) wounded – it looks rather ragged now.

Her teeth are still only two, and not yet fully out, so most of Ingrid’s food is still mush, but she has also accepted pieces of real food. Previously she would carefully spit out any lumps in her food. Now she’s eaten small pieces of fish, potato, cabbage and such. When she gets a piece of bread crust, most of it now ends up being eaten rather than crumbled on the floor. And last week she happily attacked a whole apple. More and more it seems like she prefers food with more complex flavour to simple pureed veggies.