A month ago I was hard pressed to find much to say about Ingrid’s 15th month. It seemed that not much had changed: most of what I said was “this continues” and “more of that”. This month feels very different. I guess there’s some truth in what “they” say about children developing in spurts. (And it’s probably this spurt of advancement that has caused the uncharacteristic whinging.)

Where to start? Language, perhaps, because that’s where I’ve seen the greatest change. I think Ingrid has gotten over the big threshold and really understood the concept of words. She knows that certain sounds don’t just belong with certain things, but the sounds mean things. And she tries to make those sounds herself, too, although she’s naturally much better at understanding than at talking.

Whereas last month she had a handful of signs and even fewer words, I know for sure that she now understands dozens. She knows daddy. She knows hat, mittens, trousers, and boots; book, ball, lamp, pushchair, gate, train and car; dog and bird and duck. She knows eat, fruit, sit, stand, sleep, nappies and potty. And thanks to her books she knows cat and cow and sheep and cock and duck, and some of their sounds as well.

Pronouncing words is a lot harder. She can reliably produce half a dozen consonants (P, T, B, H and J – that’s the Estonian J by the way – plus occasionally M) and two vowels (A and I). Most words get reduced to these few sounds, so most words sound almost the same, except for small variations in tone. Daddy, lamp, and boot (pappa, lamp, saabas) all sound roughly like bapa. The intended meaning is only apparent from the context. The first clear word was ball (pall, which she pronounces as paj), but she can also say “thank you” very clearly (aitäh, which also means “give this to me please” and “take this please”) as well as boob (tiss, pronounced initially as tihh but now more and more as tii, or rather tii, tii, tiiii, TIIII!).

She also knows that cows say muu and sheep say baa and owls say uhhuu and cocks say kikerikii and is really fond of those animals’ pages in her books. For a while kikerikii was her favourite word, and she kept opening Muu, säger kon at the cock’s page while saying titetii with great enthusiasm.

Now that she has understood how language works she has also become better (or maybe just more insistent) at non-verbal communication. She points, or pulls my hand, or spurs me with her heels when I’m carrying her but not moving in the right direction. But at the same time she now has higher expectations. She expects to be understood, and is most upset when we don’t get it, which is still a very common occurrence.

Books remain popular, especially books that have pictures of things that she can recognise and point out. Our living room table is covered with children’s books. We’ve also started going to the local library now. The books are all in English but she doesn’t know that – all she cares is that they have pictures of familiar things. Picture books with a story are more hit and miss. She’s ignored some of them completely, but enjoyed others after a week or two of gradually increasing interest. The Gruffalo was boring at first but then she learned to recognise the fox, the owl and the snake, and then we’d read only the pages with those animals. The gruffalo itself was not interesting at all.

Ingrid is her usual active self and gets bored after just a few hours at home. We may get up at 7 and by 9 she can already be standing at the pushchair, trying to climb up and making very insistent noises at us. It used to be that we went out in the afternoon only, now we normally go out twice a day. I try to spread out my errands so I have reason to go out every day – or we just go to a playground or indoor play area somewhere. Anything to get out. And she generally prefers the pushchair to any kind of sling, because she can see more and move more freely. That lasts until she is tired; she usually prefers the sling for sleeping.

Playgrounds and parks are more fun now that she’s a more confident walker. She likes climbing, but unfortunately few playgrounds have climbing frames for children of her size. They tend to be geared towards much older children. We’ve found one in Stepney Green that’s just right for her: challenging, but small enough that she can manage some parts all on her own. In the absence of climbing frames, staircases are good fun, as well as simple grass slopes and pavement edges: anything that’s a bit tricky to walk. She especially likes to walk and jump down from things – walking down stairs, for example. And the best part of our weekly swimming sessions is sitting on the edge and jumping in. Sometimes we spend almost the whole half-our session jumping from the edge over and over again.

For some strange reason she also thinks it is very funny to sit on things (big bags or pillows, for example). She also enjoys unpacking bags again, but with a twist. This isn’t the old “tear everything out” game. No, now she takes everything out from the grocery bags after we get home from the supermarket, one thing at a time, and carefully hands them to me.

Clothes are interesting, especially hats and mittens and boots. She likes taking off her mittens and put them back on while we’re out. She points at her head when we’re about to go out and she hasn’t got her hat on yet (or when I haven’t put mine on). She carries her own boots around, talks about them, lifts up my large boots and puts them on the bench, carries Eric’s shoes around, tries to put boots on and take them off.

Teeth are still eight only (I think – I don’t get many chances to inspect her mouth for molars). Potty use is unchanged; one session in the morning just after we get up, but then almost nothing during the day because she won’t sit still. Eating habits generally unchanged: variable, but with a great emphasis on fruit, bread, cheese and breast milk.

I look back at what I wrote last month, and I see that a month ago Ingrid had just learned to walk. That seems so long ago now. Walking was, of course, just the first step (if you pardon the pun). Walking opened the way to carrying things around, which is hard when you’re crawling, but is apparently enjoyable. Walking led to more climbing. And walking also meant that we can now go to playgrounds. Previously the swings were the only things that we could use, but now that Ingrid can walk around she can explore the whole playground and decide for herself what she wants to do.

In general Ingrid has become stronger and more coordinated. When we go swimming, she can hold onto the bar so well that I don’t need to support her at all. She likes being swung and spun and thrown up in the air, and bounced on my knees. When I stop, she jumps up and down until we do it again and again. I thought that this kind of activities was more for babies, but Ingrid enjoys them much more now than she did as a baby – she shrieks with laughter.

She also enjoys singing and music more than ever. She likes me to sing for her, and to listen to music, and she will bob her head and try to dance to the music. The theme music for Futurama is a particular favourite of hers. One day last week I even managed to cut her fingernails without any screaming, because I was singing to her all that time.

Toys are still mostly boring. If she plays with anything, it’s my gloves and hats. She can get a hand into a glove, and almost a hat on her head. But she is much more interested in picture books. The bigger the book, the better, is the general rule, although she also likes Muuu, säger kon and even a story book – Max bil. She can now turn the pages in those herself even though they are paper and not cardboard, although a few accidents have happened and the Max book has required some major repairs.

This month Ingrid has also learned to sign so she can now tell us when she is finished with something, and when she wants milk, food, or sleep. This has made life quite a lot easier.

No new teeth (still 8). Eating habits swing wildly, apart from breast milk which she likes as much as ever. For a while cream cheese was a great favourite but then that passed as well. Now the latest thing seems to be bread. Fruit, which used to be pure ambrosia, is now mostly rejected – even mandarins. Fruit juice however is good. Go figure.

Fourteen months.

Just in time for this blog post, Ingrid figured out walking. On Sunday she suddenly started walking – instead of lurching a few steps she happily toddled all the way across the room. Yesterday we were out and she didn’t get much chance to practice, but today in nursery she must have spent all day walking because this evening she was doing it quite confidently, even while holding things in both hands. And she’s now standing so confidently that she can bend her knees to pick things up from the floor, to turn and look over her shoulder, and to stretch up both arms to cheer.

Instantly, when she stands up and walks instead of crawling, she looks a lot older. A toddler, not a baby.

Something has also “clicked” for Ingrid about language. She makes a lot of very varied noises, but doesn’t say anything that I can understand, apart from the aitäh and heja she could do earlier. But it’s clear that she understands some things we say. More interestingly she now also wants to know what things are called. She points at things and says “tääh?” which seems to mean “what is that?”. Sometimes she points all the way across the street so that I have no idea what she might be pointing at, but she seems to like bushes, large bright lamps, and trains. She also points and talks while reading her books, and likes us to tell her the name of what she’s pointing at – it’s not just about turning pages any more.

Pointing in general is a new skill, and a very useful one. Meals are more pleasant for everyone when, instead of just screaming, she can point at what she wants. (Mostly she wants fruit. I think she must be a fruitarian. She never seems to tire of mandarins or grapes.)

She’s learned to make new funny noises with her mouth and hands – saying “aaaa” while patting her mouth with her hand so it goes “waaw-waaw-waaw” for example. Or saying “www” while moving a finger up and down across her lips so they vibrate. Current favourite toy: the long cardboard tube from a roll of wrapping paper. She puts it in her mouth and “talks” into it and listens to the booming noise that comes out at the other end.

We’re also making a fresh effort with baby signing. We’re starting with “more”, “eat” and “nurse” because those should be most useful for all of us. Hmm, maybe we should add something for “train”, so we have something that’s fun and not just useful?

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.

Ingrid is one year old. Old enough that it will soon seem enough to count her age in years and half-years instead of months. Old enough to be a toddler rather than a baby.

Unfortunately much of this past month was taken up with illnesses: chickenpox and a strep infection with extras. I guess we had been pretty lucky, health-wise, until now.

Her two favourite games right now are pushing and pulling. Pushing things in front of her while walking across the floor (on her feet with tall and stable “toys” like chairs, on her knees with things that are small or move too fast) – and pulling things out of any drawers she can find and open. She continues to focus on bottom drawers, even though she can easily reach the next one as well. In the living room she spreads my hankies and underwear on the floor. In the kitchen she picks out all the tea lights (and chews on them). In the bathroom she pulls out cleaning cloths and spray bottles with Ajax. These are sometimes dumped on the floor, but she also likes to throw them in the bath, especially if there is water in there. Cleaning cloths are also fun to play with in the water.

The time of chewing on everything seems to be past, and it is now a lot safer to have her explore everything. I don’t worry much about plants or computer cables or CDs any more. Even books survive her attention for a while, when she manages to pull one out from the shelf. But the power button on the computer now has a cover, firmly attached with sticky tape, to keep away curious fingers.

The toy box hasn’t seen much use recently, and I think we will reduce its contents drastically soon. Some things can be thrown away (half-chewed egg cartons), others put back to where they really belong (sieves and bowls), and some simply packed away. Many of the toys that are actual toys may become interesting again later, I suspect, when she can find new uses for them.

The only toys Ingrid has been playing with recently are balls and stacking cups. We have been rolling and throwing balls to each other, and she likes chasing them across the floor. Not for long, though – her attention span is still short and she gets bored with such things pretty quickly.

Instead she has been a lot more interested in her cardboard books: picking them up from the bottom shelf where I keep them, opening them and turning the pages. But only if she can do it on her own! If I come and try to direct her at all, to talk about what’s in the pictures or to turn the book right side up when she’s got it upside down, she pushes my hands away. I do wonder what she sees and what she thinks when looking at an upside-down picture of a lamb. She’s never seen a real lamb, after all.

In some activities I am welcome to join her. The best one is a very physical game that involves a mixture of chasing (me after her, on the floor), climbing (her over me) and tickling – and lots and lots of laughing. I am never quite sure what it is that I do that she likes so much, and it seems to change by the minute, but it gets her shrieking with laughter again and again.

She is very clearly developing a will of her own, and I can see the first inklings of what will certainly become tantrums a few months down the line. When she is not allowed to do what she wants, or when I do something that she doesn’t like, she will arch her back and scream and cry. Luckily this really only happens when she is tired. But then the smallest thing can set her off, such as taking off a t-shirt. She has also learned that it’s my hands that do things, so she tries to push them away when she expects them to do something she doesn’t like.

Speaking of things she doesn’t like… I think we now have a fix for her aversion for brushing teeth. Solution: two toothbrushes, one of which goes in my mouth, and another one that I put in her mouth. Seeing me brush my teeth is either sufficiently interesting and weird to amuse her, or simply makes it clear to her how those toothbrush things work.

Some time during the past month, a subtle line has been crossed. Ingrid’s gone from being a baby to being a little child.

I cannot really put my finger on any one thing that’s changed – it’s her whole manner of interacting with the world around her. She just seems a lot more aware and engaged with it, and exploring it a lot more aimfully. She tries to pick things up, look at them from all directions, bang them against other things. Some things bang well, others don’t. She tries to pick up my hair, the stream of water coming from the tap, and the puddles of water on the table (which, despite great improvements in her pincer grip, has never succeeded yet). And she experiments: she’s discovered that milk comes from my breasts but not from my navel, that she can hold two wooden blocks in the same hand but not three.

There is also no doubt that she has now mastered the concept of object persistence, and understood that things continue to exist when she cannot see them. She knows that when she cannot see me, the first place to look is at my desk, and the next one is the bathroom. If the bathroom light is on and the shower curtain drawn (or maybe she goes by the sound of the shower?) she has no difficulty figuring out that I’m behind the curtain, and she will pull at it until she finds me. However I have been able hide from her by lying down on the sofa, because she doesn’t think to look for me there. I so rarely have time to lie on the sofa.

She is still a creature of chaos, and likes nothing better than to destroy order. Her favourite occupation is to pull things out of shelves, drawers, boxes and bags, to knock down ordered piles. She doesn’t stack her stacking cups – she knocks them down, or if they’re nested, takes them out. It is as if order offends her. Sometimes it looks as if she doesn’t even enjoy disordering things, just tries to get it done as quickly as she can, and as soon as she’s torn them down, she loses interest – she doesn’t even play with them until I line them up again.

But it seems like she is now discovering the opposite concept as well. She has sometimes placed wooden blocks inside the box we store them in, and today she was putting a little ball inside a cup, instead of just taking it out.

She has discovered drawers and realised that new and interesting things can be found inside them. We’re vaguely considering some sort of locking mechanism, but for now it seems enough to move some things about, and keep an eye on her in the bathroom where the drawers contain household chemicals. She never goes there on her own so I’m not worried about safety yet. She’s also discovered doors and realised that they can be pushed one way and the other.

Another popular game is the thank-you game, where Ingrid gives me something and I take great care to thank her, and then I give it back and she says thank you (Estonian: aitäh). To my ears it clearly sounds like aitäh, especially because she also says it in appropriate situations outside of our game. So her two clearest words are now mme for emme (“mummy”) and aitäh (“thank you”). The third sound I think I’ve heard her use intentionally is nänn which I believe is her word for food.

In all this playing it’s been interesting to see how strongly she prefers to use her right hand. If I hand her something, she never reaches for it with her left hand.

She continues to walk with support – along the sofa or a low table, or pushing a chair in front of me. She prefers furniture to holding on to my hands. But she won’t let go, even for a moment. When she’s holding on to a chair and tries to reach the table, and it’s just a centimetre out of reach, she won’t take that leap. She’d rather sit down, move across, and stand up again. I don’t think she knows that it is possible to stand without support.

In Stockholm we also discovered that she can climb up stairs, as long as the steps are not too high. But she obviously has no understanding of danger, or of gravity, so she would happily try to sit down halfway up the stairs when there was nothing behind her. We have no stairs at home so further practice will have to wait. She does, however, practice climbing on me.

Random fact: she hates being held fast. Toothbrushing is a one- to two-second affair, and then she starts screaming. She rarely lets me hold her hand to show her how to operate a toy, or press a button. And there is no way she would sit on my lap to look at a picture book together, although she will explore them on her own.

PS: It’s getting harder and harder to get good pictures of her, because she doesn’t stay still long enough!

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.

Nine months. Time flies. It doesn’t feel like a month has passed since I last wrote one of these posts.

Ingrid crawls happily around the flat and gradually discovers new parts of the living room. It seems to still be hard work for her, because she doesn’t like to crawl long distances, but it’s certainly made life more fun for her. Not only can she explore the world: she can also reach toys that used to be just out of reach, as well as wholly new toys (shoes are good!) – or simply show that she wants to play with me by crawling towards me.

The plants have survived her attention and I get the impression that she actually understand that she isn’t supposed to pull at them.

Standing up, holding on to my hands, is another favourite pastime. Sometimes, when she’s feeling adventurous, she even takes a few steps. But for some reason hands are the only thing that she uses for support when pulling herself up. Once she is standing, she can let go of my hands in order to grab hold of a chair or my knee, but not before. The farthest she’ll go with just furniture is onto her knees, not to standing.

She hasn’t fallen at all when standing – when she gets tired or loses her balance, she lands on her cloth-nappy-padded bottom. She doesn’t fall forward because there’s always something there to hold on to. She’s more likely to hurt herself crawling, actually – not only when crawling off beds but also when she simply slips on the floor.

The first tooth is halfway out and the second one is already visible and on its way.

The teeth are not exactly useful for eating yet so her food is still mashed and pureed. But lumpy purees are more and more OK: she used to filter them out, swallow the rest and push any lumps out with her tongue. Now she mashes the lumps with her gums. And she is quite happy to eat real pieces of banana. I’d have thought that finger foods would be fun for her by now but she cannot pick things up between thumb and index finger yet, only with a full hand grip, and that makes it hard to actually put small things in her mouth. So I’m still putting all the food in her mouth, one way or another.

On the other hand, she has totally understood how sippy cups work: you grab the handles and pull the cup towards you and put the spout in your mouth and tilt the cup, and then you suck lots of water in your mouth and spit it out in a well-controlled, tight, beautifully curved spurt that soaks everything.

The noises she make are getting more and more differentiated and she is, I think, getting to the point where she purposefully makes different noises in different situations. Nowhere near “emme” yet, but close to being conscious communication. (While crying is communication, it generally seems like an instinctive thing, whereas words seem more conscious.)

Eight months.

(This post is several days late but we’ll call that a rounding error.)

After sitting and rolling, Ingrid is now focusing her efforts on crawling. While she can move around, it still takes a great effort and she doesn’t have as much control as she would like to: she ends up in the wrong place, or cannot reach quite as far as she wants. She is very close to mastering real crawling now – in the last few days she has discovered the classical crawling position (on her hands and knees) and is just about to figure out what to do next. Right now she assumes the position but doesn’t yet move her hands or legs forward.

In the meantime she has been preparing for the next stage, which is standing and walking. One of her favourite games is to hold on to my hands and pull herself from sitting to standing. Initially she got sort of stuck in the standing position: her legs would get tired and go wobbly, and she would look a bit miserable, because she didn’t know how to sit down. But she’s figured that out now. She’s even experimenting with letting go of one hand, or holding onto my arm or knee or some other suitable thing (or unsuitable, such as the edge of my clothes, which don’t give her much support at all).

Sometimes she blithely lets go with both hands even though there’s no chance she can stay upright with no support, because she has no real concept of falling or hurting herself, and very little understanding of cause and effect. Anything that hurts her probably comes as an unpleasant surprise every time: I imagine it would feel as if the floor had suddenly hit her, or the world suddenly hurts. I’m in no hurry to teach her about those concepts yet. If she hurts herself by things that she does on her own (like kicking the floor), that’s one thing, but while she is playing with me, I’m happy for her to rely on me.

She seems to have learned to kiss. At least that’s what I think she’s trying to do. Her kisses are very wet and mostly open-mouthed, and sometimes mutate into a half-bite, half-kiss thing, but they are generally aimed at my face and she seems very happy when she does it, so I guess it’s kisses. It is really sweet.

Today I discovered the first tooth. I wonder if that will lead to even more chewing. It would seem impossible for her to be more chewy than she already is, but I’m sure she can surprise us.

We’ve been experimenting with food quite a bit. Ingrid has tried both chicken and fish, and rice and pasta and potato, and yoghurt. She likes drinking water and sucking on Finncrisp rye crispbread. Some store-bought baby food jars proved unexpectedly popular, while some things that I thought would be no-brainers (nectarine and apricot) were rejected immediately and decisively.

She has also rediscovered her ability to make sounds. She was making simple vowel sounds (aah and ääh) several months ago but then stopped and went quiet. Now she’s clearly trying out a new range of sounds again. Da-da-da is a common one, as is hä-hä-hä. The former could easily be interpreted as the beginnings of “daddy”, if it wasn’t for the fact that she says it in all sorts of situations that don’t involve daddy, so it’s really just vocal gymnastics.

Separation anxiety comes and goes. At times she is happy playing on her own, other times she gets upset the moment I leave the room and she cannot see me. On the other hand she is happy to go wherever I am, and doesn’t mind playing on the bathroom floor or sitting in the kitchen watching me make a sandwich.

Seven months.

Sitting unsupported, which was the big news for Ingrid a month ago, is now everyday fare. I no longer bother to put a pillow behind her, even. I was going to write that it’s been weeks since she last fell over, but then she went and proved me wrong earlier today… Bath times are a lot easier and less nerve-wracking now that I no longer need to hold onto her all the time, and can reach for the sponge without worrying.

She uses her new upright position to explore the world around her. A good way to keep her amused now is to put a big box with stuff in front of her. She takes each of the things from the box, briefly turns it over and puts it in her mouth, then puts it down next to her and reaches for the next. When the box is almost empty – empty enough to not be fun any more – she shouts. I shovel everything back in the box and she starts over.

Likewise when we are out on one of our afternoon walks, she reaches out for things she can see from the pushchair. We drive close to leafy bushes, and brick walls, and lamp posts, and she pokes at them with her fingers. Luckily both brick walls and lamp posts are impossible to put in the mouth so I don’t need to worry about how dirty they are. I just hope the bushes I take her to are not immediately poisonous. (Not that I allow her to eat them but she does occasionally pull them to her mouth.)

All this lifting and grasping has been good practice for her hands and fingers. She can grip things she would have dropped a month ago, and no longer runs the danger of accidentally hitting herself in the head or poking her eyes with them. This has greatly increased the range of toys she can play with. All kinds of non-fragile and non-dangerous household items can now be put into toy duty: whisks, bowls, measuring spoons, empty jars, CD cases and so on.

Ingrid would also very much like to move around on her own. When she is lying down, she often spots something interesting just out of reach, and pushes with her whole body to reach it. She has never yet moved forward by even the slightest bit – at best she manages to push herself backwards. But moving backwards is quite enough to get her tangled up in furniture, and when you add rolling over, she can accidentally reach all sorts of things. They are generally unsuited to chewing but of course they tend to end up in her mouth anyway. I am actually not looking forward to her learning to crawl.

During the last two weeks Ingrid has become more clingy – unless I’m imagining things. It may be because she has been sick for quite a lot of this time, or maybe she’s starting to realise that she is forced to be apart from us during the week. I’ve been holding and carrying her around more than I used to. Once again I am really grateful for our slings and baby carriers!

About a week ago she also began to go to sleep on her own, with no rocking or patting or shushing. This was a development that took me completely by surprise: there were no signs that anything like this was about to happen. After two nights of a lot of crying, it suddenly became obvious that any rocking or patting was now just disturbing and upsetting her. I can now help her calm down if (or rather, when) she wakes up and is upset in the middle of the night, but I cannot help her go back to sleep. And when she isn’t upset, I can just lay her down and she goes to sleep with no help at all.

I have a suspicion that the clinginess and the independent sleeping are related. They may sound like complete opposites, but I think she may be coming to realise that she is separate from me, and can be separate from me. Separation anxiety, in other words. When she is upset, whether it’s day or night, it is generally enough to just pick her up and hold her close.