Cordelia is Fifteen Months Old

Amy Brown — Sat, 30 Dec 2006 04:30:00 GMT

Cordelia is my little monkey. She is fearless and ambitious — this morning she was hauling the cat carrier around the house, dragging it behind her and bashing into every damn thing. She dragged it into the kitchen and before I could turn around she had climbed on it and was messing around on the counter. She does appalling things like that every day; I certainly didn't get any experience with this kind of behaviour from Delphine.

Last time I posted about Cordelia, she had just started walking. Well, she's been walking for four months now and she's pretty darn good at it. Mostly. The other day I put her down in the front yard and she took off like a flash down the path; there's a little step right before the path meets the sidewalk, and she stepped down it. Unfortunately the step is about four inches, and Cordelia's leg is also about four inches, and so after her foot made contact with the ground, her right hand did, then her left, and then... her head. She hardly cried at all, but I had to pick some grit out of her, and now she's walking around with a gnarly big scab on her forehead. She doesn't care; it makes her look fierce.

She says a few words now: cat, up, milk, ball, book, Mimi (which applies to all cats), Daddy, Mummy, duck, and of course, "no", with a little head shake. She always says "no" when you ask her a question; I think she just likes shaking her head. She had her eye on my tea — the child is always thirsty — and asked for it, but then answered her own question by shaking her head sadly: "no".

Fifteen months is the age Delphine was when we started putting her down to sleep alone; Cordelia has been sleeping alone for almost a year. She sleeps from six or six-thirty until six in the morning, and she goes down without a fight. Last night I was nursing her to sleep and she stopped nursing and looked around. I issued my usual ultimatum: "Boobie or bed!" Her typical response is to latch right back on in a hurry, but last night she said "Bed!", and sat up to be put in the crib.

She's down to one nap a day, mostly — she just suddenly stopped needing a morning nap one day. The catch is that when she's sick she still needs two naps some days, and I'm never sure whether any given day will be a one-napper or a two-napper. Makes planning ahead hard.

Being in the house with Cordelia is also really hard; if I want to go upstairs or to the basement, I have to pick her up; I can't work in the basement with her because there are too many hazards: cat litter, stairs, unexpected pointy things. Upstairs we don't have a baby gate for stairs, so I have to pick a room to work in, shut the door, and stay there. So mostly we stay on the main floor, which makes unpacking and doing laundry and any other multifloor pursuit very difficult. I do miss having everything on the same floor, but I have to remind myself that one day Cordelia will be able to handle stairs and being by herself, so I will be able to get stuff done much easier.

And in the meantime, she makes me laugh every single day.

Blog-O! (Posts about sleep)

Cordelia is Fifteen Months Old