Swinging Away


Sunday, October 16, 2005

Alexandre grows stronger and stronger each day! In the past few days, he’s started to take a few steps on his own!! He does it slowly, tentatively, by keeping one hand on the bed, sofa, or whatever he’s been holding onto… while reaching forward towards me, then, very quickly shuffling his two feet one in front of the other, while his arms are spread out as if he’s using them to keep his balance. When he does this, his facial expression (open mouth, a tense smile, and laughing at the same time) reveals the combination of fear and excitement he has at being able to move on his feet without holding onto something.

But, while he’s still not completely confident about walking on his own, he walks really fast while grasping onto one of your hands now, instead of two. This has only happened in the past few days, and you can feel him cruising ahead. It feels like if I let go, he’ll just keep going… but not quite yet! When he wants to get somewhere on his own, and quickly, he prefers to just drop on his knees and crawl.

We went to the Mt. Austin Playground for the first time today, One of the reasons I took him there is because there’s a huge patch of grass which dogs are not allowed on… so I thought I’d let him crawl around for a bit (a rare opportunity to crawl on clean grass in HK!) … But as soon as I put his feet down on the grass, he raised his arms up and wanted me to pick him up… so we walked over to the playground instead…where he had a ball on the swing, and crawling around the outdoor jungle gym… he loves to climb up the slide, which he can do quite well now, especially if you put on his shoes and keep his knees exposed… We met up with Jean Francois and Mary’s twins, Aurelien and Baptiste, who are 2-1/2 months older than Alexandre, so walking around quite confidently now. They don’t really play with each other… it’s more like playing around each other, and occasionally stopping to check each other out.

Alexandre now has four upper teeth and two lower teeth, and it seems more are on their way, because he keeps trying to bite things, like my face, my leg, my shoulder, etc… and anything he can chomp down on basically! He seems to understand me when I tell him “no” in a disciplinary tone, because when I do this while holding him up to face me, he refuses to look me in the face… Can you believe it? It’s semi-maddening, yet I can’t help but laugh at the same time, because I can’t believe he’s already learned to react in this way! Did we somehow teach him this inadvertently? Or, is it just innate to human beings that we develop this ability to ignore what we don’t want to hear or see?

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