Luca - Month 12

Our year with Luca has been so whimsical and filled with magic. There have been rough moments too - how else are we do recognize the good if we didn't have bad, right? But right now, as I type, I'm hard-pressed to remember those. It's some sort of mommy amnesia I'm sure. Wait, let me think. Yep, I can think of a few. I'll save those for another post. Right now it's all about how wonderfully our baby is thriving.



On his first birthday, he still had no teeth. But about a week later, my mom spotted a little white nub poking through the front of his bottom jaw. He's not a fan of opening his mouth for us to peer inside but I can feel that sharp little point with my finger.

He is cruising around the furniture now, holding on while "walking" around the room on his feet. He is extremely fast while crawling. I need to basically jog to keep up if I'm not paying attention. I think he waits for me to look away for a second and then he revs up his engine to get as far away as possible before I notice. It's funny. He makes a long wheezy noise with a sharp intake of breath as he scuttles away, gaping wide drooly smile. Sometimes he'll actually try to be quiet as he crawls so slowly away but as soon as he notices I see him, he makes that funny noise and goes faster. He'll crawl over and hold up his arms to be picked up now too. That's kind of new-ish. He might have been doing that the previous month. I can't remember!





He kisses us on the cheek if we ask for a one. His kisses are really just him touching our face with his open mouth and making a "mwah!" sound. They're really slimy. But I love them. For a while there, he thought kisses were head butts. I think he was confusing the head movement with the more nuanced lips part of a kiss. He still does a head butt when he likes something in particular or is really happy. In fact, when he first saw the big Mickey Mouse doll that Alps and Tesh gave him for his 1st birthday, he touched his forehead to Mickey's forehead. The sweetest thing to see. But it can get him into trouble too because he can't really control the force of the head touch. For example yesterday, at Din Tai Fung, he was in the high chair and so excited to be be sitting up at the table with us, he did a head butt right into the table. He was NOT happy after that.







He loves the porridge my parents make for him. They call it baby food because they blend it up into a mush. It's filled with wholesome, fresh ingredients. Meat, veggies, rice, broth. My dad makes the broth from scratch using bones. Sometimes they'll use fish. In fact, Luca hates the store bought baby-food that has meat in it but he yells for more of the porridge. I've tasted it and it's really quite delicious.

His hair is long and I don't want to cut it.

He says dada and mama consistently. He is babbling up a storm now. He makes inflections like he is asking questions, like "da da da daaa?" He'll flip through his books and just spout gibberish. Well, gibberish to us. I'm sure it totally make sense to him.

He loves to watch other kids but doesn't really have a chance to interact with them. We have to be better about booking playdates!

He LOVES books. So much that he eats them. That part is probably because he's teething. His current favorites:

The Pout-Pout fish - he kisses his favorite pages! so cute.
Io Sono Piccola? (Italian/English)
Five Little Monkeys
Brown Bear Brown Bear - was the prime favorite for a long time but has fallen lower on the spectrum
If I were an Owl
Vroom Vroom Cars

I try showing him television sometimes but he's not that into it. Though, I did show him Sesame Street for the first time last week - when he saw Big Bird for the first time he let out a gleeful laugh.

He's all about tossing things. He takes each one of the nesting buckets and tosses them. Sometimes he'll put things back into the container. Then take it right back out and toss it. And he loves to hand items to us. In fact, he'll hand us something only to immediately reach out to ask for it back, and then hand it right back to us less than 2 seconds later.

Impossibly, he still loves peek-a-boo.

He loves it when I sing two specific songs to him: Twinkle Twinkle Little Star and Itsy Bitsy Spider. I always incorporate the hand gestures I learned in grade school. I marvel that I still remember them. My mom asked the other day how I knew those songs and to make the hand movements. I told her I learned them in grade school. "And now you're singing them to your child," she said. Seems like a simple statement to you but my mom never says things like this. She is not outwardly nostalgic or sentimental in any way. It was a brief but nice moment.



Here's a bit of insight into these monthly sessions. We need to be so quick and it takes quite a few shutter clicks to get one I'm happy with. It takes quite a bit of time to edit through the photos in the end as well. Which is why I'm not sure whether I'll be continuing this monthly tradition. Maybe I'll switch it up - a portrait every 3 months? Do we use the same chair?



Here's a link to the entire set of photos.