Ian’s been off since Friday before Christmas, so all three of us have had a nice relaxing time together, Ian and I taking turns having a lie-in and the other one getting up to take care of Jessica in the mornings. We haven’t been up to much at all, really, and it’s been good not to have many plans to worry about.
On Boxing Day, we decided to drive over to Reigate to have a look at the Priory Park, which is in the process of having a major make-over. Big parts of the Park still looked like a building site when we got there, but the playground seemed pretty much ready, with lots of different swings, a climbing wall and a huge wooden ship to climb on. We put Jessica on one of the swings for a while and then Ian walked around the playground so that she could watch all the other kids running around and playing, and she was really enjoying herself, giggling away.
We strolled on to the big pond, where there were lots of ducks, seagulls and a few swans, and this time we were prepared and had brought some bread to tempt the birds to come closer. The seagulls were especially entertaining, darting up and down in white, shimmering flocks, almost every time beating the ducks to it to the food offered – Jessica laughed out loud several times (the most wonderful sound in the world…!).
Jessica’s still not taken more than a few steps now and then on her own and prefers to walk holding on to one hand of either one of us – I guess it takes her much quicker from A to B… A popular circuit for the last couple of weeks has been from the hallway through to the kitchen, bathroom and toilet – where she checks the washing machine to see if it’s doing anything at the moment – and back again, very often with a potato or clementine held high in her right hand and Mummy dragged behind by her left… (For some reason every turn tends to be anti-clockwise.)
In the last few days, the potato or clementine has been replaced by a few of the toys she got for Christmas – a Pippi Longstocking doll, Lilla Gubben stuffed horse or a little yellow tray with honey bees on – and she has also started to place them inside the washing machine. So far she’s not really been letting ago (apart from the Pippi doll once, when she let go very briefly and then quickly grabbed hold again), but I suspect we might have to check inside the drum carefully before we start a washing cycle in future, just in case we might be washing all sorts of things we didn’t intend to…!
In the last 2-3 weeks, Jessica’s got much more interested in her books (as you might have gathered from my Christmas Day entry) and she’ll quite happily pick them up herself to look at. Initially, she’d turn the whole book over a few times and occasionally get a few pages open seemingly by chance, but she’s got increasingly skilful at flicking through the pages. She’s now also discovered that a couple of the books have tabs at the side to make it easier to grab each page to turn it – thing is, though, she tends to go for the tab nearest to her which is the one at the back, which means that when she uses that method she turns almost all pages in the book in one go… As one of her first books had patches of different textures on its pages, which she likes to scratch with her fingertips, she tends to run her hand over the pages in other books too, to find the textures there.
When Jessica saw the Christmas decorations we’d put up in the living room, she reached her hand out towards them, and I guess I assumed she was trying to reach them. But she has made the same gesture loads of times since, and it turns out to be her way of pointing at things, to indicate what she is looking at. It’s mainly overhead lights (at which point I’ve now started to repeat the word “lampa”, in the hope that she’ll start making the connection and mimic the sound), the Christmas baubles and twinkling lights, and a few times the clock on the wall in the kitchen (when I repeat “klocka”). But she has also looked directly at Ian, hand stretched out and gone “Da-da” several times in the last 3-4 days. “Da-da-da…” is the sound she’s using the most at the moment, but we don’t think it was a coincidence when she pointed out Ian so clearly.
Another new thing is that Jessica occasionally shakes her head. It doesn’t seem to be in any particular context and not in connection with a protest or anything, so probably more because it’s something she’s discovered she can do. When I’ve nodded my head at her she’s found it amusing and giggled – I was hoping she might try to copy me soon, although she doesn’t seem to be at that stage in her development yet.
Gabriella