Life has a limited number of watershed moments and watching your baby take her first steps is one of them. Audrey took her first steps on her first birthday; Grace isn't there yet but for the past couple of weeks she has been standing up and raising her arms in the air to show off what she can do. She thinks it's pretty funny really - until she loses her balance and plunks back down on her rear end.
For now Grace has to resort to crawling to get around and has mastered that for sure. Her army crawl of two months ago is gone - she now gets around so fast that in a blink of an eye she's moved from doing something she's supposed to be doing to examining an electrical wall outlet on the other side of the room or examining the microwave when it's on or attempting the climb the stairs.
In fact a few weeks ago she did climb the stairs before anyone realized it. Our stairs are hardwood so that's a definite no-no and we even have a gate, but any parent knows that a mobile baby can be hard to keep track of and can elude even the most preventive measures. Maybe we shouldn't have worried because she climbed them Dan Osman-style, taking no more than a minute to scale the first section, turn the corner and then keep going. When we saw her she was on the top step, looking down and laughing. Not so funny for us though - carpeting the stairs has moved up a notch or two on the to-do list.
As I think about it there is a concentration of watershed moments in the first year or so of a baby's life - another one is her first word. It's amazing to consider that the utterance of a word (or even a sound that resembles a word) creates so much excitement. Humans, after all, are social beings and it should be no surprise that we can speak. But an important moment that first word is.
Audrey's first word was "hi;" Grace's first was "daddy" (or at least a word that sounded like "daddy"). I know, I know. In Grace's case I'm flattered. It's pretty cool. But I think it would have been "mommy" if not for the fact that "m" is a harder letter to pronounce when you're less than 1 year old. And she can now say "ma ma" with no problem.
Now that she's done that though all her subsequent sounds have been very important but slightly less captivating. You can say "one" to her, for example, and she'll say, "doooo!" (meaning two). Or you can ask her to say "thank you" and she'll say something along the lines of "deek doo." And she can wave and blow kisses at people too. All are great tricks when we have people over but none have the same luster of her first word. If she's as verbal as her sister was she'll be capable of having conversations in no time.
These watershed moments have a way of staying with you. If you must know, my first word was allegedly "briefcase." I'm somewhat embarrassed to admit it but that's what my father carried to and from work every day. Nobody uses briefcases any longer and I imagine if I'd been born this year my first word might be iPhone or something because that's what my father carries now. In any case, I hear about it.
