Someone has switched my baby. Instead of the one I know, who was generally happy and full of energy, there’s now one who whinges and complains about almost everything. Putting on clothes? Oh no, not clothes! Changing the nappy? No no no, hate nappies! Hungry, but angrily shakes her head at all the food I offer. Tired, but screams when I take her to the bedroom. Clingy, but fights me while I put her in the sling.

And while the old one wasn’t a great sleeper, she had learned to go to sleep without much of a struggle. This stranger I have here now can spend an hour fussing and fighting me in the bed. Which means she doesn’t get enough sleep, which makes her mood even worse.

We had a round of something similar back in November, and at the time I guessed that Ingrid was angry because she couldn’t tell us what she wants. That’s still part of the problem, I’m sure. While she has become better at communicating, she’s also developed new and more complex wants that are harder to explain by pointing at things.

But I suspect that this time there’s more to it. It seems that now the underlying cause is frustration over not being able to control the world. Ingrid now gets angry when things are not done her way and don’t go exactly the way she wants – when she cannot decide. She may not like a wet nappy, but when I decide to change it she still gets angry because it was my decision. She may feel cold when we’re out, but gets angry when I put on her hat. However if she gets to pull out the hat herself and hold it out to me, then it’s OK to put the hat on. Same deal with the sling: once she is sitting there she is happy, but she seems to resent my decision to put her in the sling.

I wasn’t expecting this kind of independence and need to control quite yet… Well, anyway, I’m sure it’s just a phase. As always.

Occasionally we buy toys for Ingrid. Not too many, because most stuff that’s out there is not at all appealing. Lots of cheap plastic and things that go beep. Sometimes, however, we find things we like.

But our opinion is not a very good predictor of Ingrid’s opinion. We find something and think, oh, she’ll like this one! If I was a kid then I would certainly enjoy playing with this! And she just goes “meh” and ignores it completely. That’s what happened with a lovely colourful wooden bead frame from IKEA for example. I doubt if she’s even spent half an hour playing with it. In fact we should probably just throw it out or give it away.

Sometimes she’s just not ready for a certain toy yet. That’s the case for soft toys, I suspect. She has never shown any interest in any of her cuddly soft animals.

For quite a while I thought that was also the case for building blocks. We have a wagon with a set of (lovely colourful wooden) blocks. She has shown some interest in pulling the wagon along. She is happy to knock down towers that I build. But she is not at all interested in building anything herself. So I figured that she’s not into building things yet. It’ll come.

Wrong. We’d just given her the wrong building materials. Who wants colourful wooden blocks when you can get rolls of brown packing tape? (After I took this picture she went on to complete her tower of 4 rolls of tape, perfectly aligned, but it got demolished when she tried to pick the whole structure up and carry it away.)

Tape tower	Tape bangles

We went to Discover in Stratford again, almost exactly a month after our last visit (during the long Christmas holidays). It was interesting to see how differently Ingrid reacted to things, and how different her play was.

Last time Ingrid’s favourite place was a low table with play food and plastic plates-pots-pans. She stood there for a long time, lifting things from one bowl to another, or into a basket that she then carried around. This time the table was still interesting, but her first move was to climb up on top of it, and then hand things to me from there. All other pieces of furniture were also primarily used for climbing, especially chairs of various sorts.

While she was an intrepid climber, she was much more cautious about exploring this time. A low “cave” was too scary to enter alone, and a dimly lit room where some parts of the floor made noises set her off crying. She stayed in the well-lit areas all the time.

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.

More baby signing goodness! After “all done” and “boob” Ingrid has more or less learned “sleep” and “drink” as well. Both quite useful signs.

The boob sign has turned out to be particularly interesting. The signing makes it very obvious how often she really thinks about boobs. I knew that she likes breastfeeding when she gets up (in the morning as well as after naps) and in the evening, and sometimes when she’s hungry, and sometimes when she’s upset. But she also signs “boob” at random intervals during the day. “Here’s a toy, hmm let’s see what I can do with that, oh look there’s mummy, BOOB!”

Ingrid has also started combining the sign with the word (in Estonian), pronouncing it clearly enough to leave no doubt that it’s a word and not just noise. This is her third more-or-less clear word which she uses on her own initiative. I’m not sure but I get the impression that the signing helped. Perhaps giving her a very simple and unique symbol for an important concept made it easier to learn the word as well?

All of her other words really sound the same… there’s “baba”, I think, for “daddy” (“pappa”) but also “bapa” for “navel” (“naba”) and “päppä” for “lamp” (“lampa”).

For some reason Ingrid has been fascinated by my navel. Most times when we sit down to breastfeed she starts by pointing at my navel and saying “bapa”. She has discovered that the navel looks similar to my nipples and to a birthmark, and tried using the “bapa” word for all of these – “little round thing on mummy’s skin”, perhaps?

Today Ingrid understood how spoons work, I think.

She’s been playing with spoons since she started eating solids but would rarely use them for eating – it was up to me to get the food to her mouth. She got a little cutlery set as well as a silver spoon for her first birthday and has been practicing a lot more since then.

The big challenge was gravity. A spoon fits much better in the mouth when it is upside down (try it!), with the concave side touching the tongue. So inevitably the spoon in Ingrid’s hand would turn upside down at some point on its way from bowl to mouth, which led to much food dripping onto her bib.

The other difficulty was understanding how food gets onto the spoon. She would dip the spoon upright in the food – peck, peck, peck – and lick off the little that stuck to it. Or she’d wait for me to put food on the spoon, and then take the spoon to her mouth, and then put the spoon back in the bowl and look expectantly at me.

But today for the first time I saw her try to scoop up food with the spoon, and then guide the spoon to the mouth without turning it. I think it’s clicked for her. It’s fun to see this kind of thing happen!

I’ve uploaded a bunch of new photos.

Less than two weeks ago we restarted our efforts to teach Ingrid baby signs, based on the strong suggestion of a commenter. We’d given up earlier because she didn’t seem to pay much attention. This time, however, the success was clear and immediate. (Thank you, Katarina!)

After about a week she tentatively copied the “all done” sign after a finished meal. Since that was met with cheering, she tried it the next time as well. And oh how happy she was when this led to her getting down from the highchair! Huge beaming smiles all around. She hasn’t been eating much recently so it has been hard for us to judge whether she is done or just wants something else (for “something else” read “fruit”). Now that she can tell us when she’s done, all of us are less frustrated.

At first she only did it after meals, but I think she’s also generalised it to other situations – “all done with bath” primarily, because that’s the other activity she cannot finish or get away from without help.

The other sign that she picked up very quickly was the “milk” sign. A great success all around, because her previous signals for wanting milk have never been very clear: a slightly different unhappy noise was the best we got for a long time, until she learned to pull at my t-shirt. I must say I much prefer signing to t-shirt-pulling – firstly it’s less uncomfortable, but more importantly she can do it from a distance.

She hasn’t understood “eat” yet and I think she slightly confuses “milk” with “eat” – not because they look similar but because milk is probably the quintessential food for her. “More” hasn’t clicked yet, either. We’ll keep trying. Our next signs will probably be “all gone / empty”, “dog”, “bird” and “airplane” – and “crane” if I can find or think of a sign, since she has been pointing out every single building site and crane we pass.

PS: I’ve mostly picked signs based on American Sign Language (ASL) because I could easily find online resources for ASL – photo dictionarys etc – whereas British web pages only tried to sell me books, DVDs or classes. Too much marketing, too little information.

From the Internet and from books I get the impression that “baby’s first steps” and “baby’s first word” are considered to be important milestones. My experience is that the very first ones are actually not particularly interesting at all.

The first time Ingrid stood without support, she didn’t realize she was doing it. Same for the second, third, and fiftieth time. But then one day she understood that she can stand, and from that moment on she can stand.

Her first steps happened one or two at a time, but again she didn’t realize what was going on. Although she was taking steps, she wasn’t walking – she was standing but happened to move forward. And again, one day she understood that she can walk, and from that moment on she walks confidently (though not effortlessly or faultlessly) and probably won’t be doing much crawling at all.

I imagine the same applies to language. First words are irrelevant. For many months now she has been able to say a few words and put them in context, i.e. she knows to say heja when coming home or leaving home. But for a long time that looked like simple mimicking without understanding the meaning, the purpose of language. Only recently she started showing signs of really understanding that words belong with things, that things have names – she likes pointing at objects around the house and hearing their names. Just like with learning to walk, this happened quite suddenly. So one part of that quantum leap has probably taken place. I’m not sure about the other part – actively and purposefully using words in order to achieve something. Maybe she already knows how to do it but cannot twist her tongue into the right shape, or maybe she hasn’t understood that yet.