Memories for Max | 13 Months

Yesterday max turned 13 months old. Now, to be totally honest, I thought I’d have pretty much stopped counting the months by now, and had originally intended to stop writing these monthly updates once he reached one. Well, his first birthday came and went, and I realised that he’s still changing so much right now that there are so many things I’m going to forget about each stage of his development, unless I write them down. So, without further ado, here are some random memories for Max, at 13 months…

The BAM game

Probably his favourite – and cutest – game right now is the ‘BAM’ game, which happens every time he manages to get hold of a pen, say, or a spoon, or anything reasonably long and thin. ‘BAM!’ he shouts, while pointing his chosen implement at the closest person – who, of course, has to dramatically pretend to fall over, or make a funny noise or something. Max then continues around the room, ‘BAM-ing’ everyone, and shrieking with laughter at the reactions he gets. It’s very, very sweet – even when it’s been going on for 10 minutes straight, I promise…

Baby cuddles

Max has never been a particularly cuddly baby – he’s always too busy looking around him to want to sit still and cuddle – but lately when I get him out of bed in the morning I’ll say, “Do you have a hug for mummy?” and he’ll immediately snuggle into my shoulder and let me cuddle him for a few seconds. It’s the highlight of my day, basically. As is…

Hand holding

Although he can now walk pretty well by himself, Max still prefers to hold someone’s hand while he does it – which he does by reaching up, taking your hand, and then very precisely arranging it so that he’s holding the preferred finger, in the preferred way, before setting off on his travels. He also likes to hand us small objects, and will then carefully fold our fingers over it – presumably to keep the item “safe.” Clever boy…

The Door Handle Obsession

For a short, but intense, couple of weeks around the time of his birthday, Max developed a total obsession with door handles. Yes, door handles. Every time he saw one, he’d instantly start pointing at it, and begging to be held up next to it, so he could practice moving it up and down. This obviously got old fast for Terry and I, so we started refusing to meet his door-handle demands, even although we knew it would result in what we refer to as a Tiny Tantrum. I’m happy to report that the door handle obsession has now faded somewhat: I mean, he’s still fascinated by the things, but we’re no longer spending most of our time trying to distract him from them, and have now gone back to a long-standing fascination with batteries – or “BUH’S” as he calls them – which he will remove from the remote control, just to play with them. We spend a LOT of time taking the remote control away, and scouring the room for stray batteries now. I think I might have preferred the door handles, to be honest.

Music

He’s always loved music, but lately he’s taken to pointing excitedly at the Amazon Echo any time he wants us to play something for him. Current favourites are George Ezra’s ‘Shotgun’, Anne-Marie’s ‘2002’ and, well, the video for ‘Despacito’. No, I have no idea…

Words

So far, apart from ‘Mama’ and ‘Dada’, the only really clear word he says is “NO” – which says a lot about how often we have to tell him to put down the remote control, really – but he has a range of different sounds to indicate various different objects. Confusingly for us, though, it seems that most of the things he’s interested in start with the letter B, so the sound ‘BUH’ can mean ‘banana’, ‘book’, ‘ball’ … er, ‘battery’. He’ll also say things like “CAH” for ‘car’ and ‘mee’ for ‘dummy’, though, and last night Terry claims Max pointed at the Echo, and said, “SAH!” for ‘Alexa’. So that’s going to end well, obviously.

Pointing

Every morning when I go to get him out of bed, I switch on the light in the nursery, and Max smiles in delight, and then immediately starts pointing at various objects around the room (Always accompanied by a questioning sound, which I interpret as, “THAT! WHAT’S THAT?!” which I have to name for him. We go through the same thing again downstairs, after which Terry and I will ask him to point to various things around the room: he gets lots of praise when he gets these right, and is always very excited by it – not quite as excited as he is when we get Alexa to change the lights in his room (Always greeted with his trademark, “OOOOOH!” – but still, everything’s amazing when you’re 13 months old, I guess!

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Of course, I’m 100% sure that, as soon as I publish this post, I’m going to instantly remember at least eleventy-one other cute little things he does right now, but such is life with a boy who seems to be learning new skills on the daily. And, once again, I find myself having to declare this to be my very favourite stage so far: sure, it’s been a pretty exhausting stage, really, because he’s just so active (I can’t even count the number of mugs of coffee that have been spilled lately, either because he’s suddenly lunged towards me while I’ve been drinking one, or because I’ve suddenly had to lunge towards HIM, to get him out of whichever brand of trouble he’s about to walk into…), but he’s also just so incredibly CUTE that I’m sure he must be sick to death of me trying to pick him up and squeeze him all the time. The little attempts at words, and his excitement at every new thing (or old thing) he encounters is just so sweet. He makes us smile every single day with all of the little things I’ve listed in this post, and I know that next month he’s going to be completely different, which is why I wanted to take a few minutes to write down some of these precious memories. We’ll never be here again, after all…