One of the fun things about having twins is being able to have your own little observatory of the great range of Normal as it relates to early childhood development. It is also sometimes stressful because sometimes I’m all WHY IS HE DOING THAT BUT SHE ISN’T? Or the other way around.

Harper JUST started to roll over. I met an 9 month old who was RUNNING, but Harper finally decided over the course of last week that she’d flip herself over and over and over again. It’s not that she COULDN’T roll over, after all, we would find her sleeping on her side at night. Plus, she’s got the abdominal strength from all the leg lifts/baby wrestling she does lifting her legs straight up and then banging them onto the crib mattress, time and time again. It’s just that she is a pretty easy going baby and finds contentment, though not complaceny, in whatever position she is in. Unless it’s too long on her belly. Then she’ll just lay on her side and look up at you with pleading eyes to sit her up. And I do it because she has a spell on me.

She still dances to music. Any music. She likes to surprise us with her laughter, laughing out of nowhere, so happy, and the three of us will look at her and she’ll stop laughing for a second and then wheeze and smile, like she’s on the inside of the joke that we can only see from the window. It sounds and looks like this:

In an effort to avoid the sippy cup, we worked on drinking water from an open-top cup for a couple days. She took to it a bit, but we decided to teach her to use a straw instead, last week of December. Within a day, she had it down. She looks forward to the cup so we have to hide it until after she’s done with her meal.

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Mateo, not so much. We tried the cup and he was gumming it and thus only getting water because the banging against the cup would spill water into the vicinity of his mouth. So we tried teaching the straw (plugging the top of the straw and letting him suck from the bottom of the straw), but he’d just sit there with his mouth open like a little bird waiting for a worm. So I relented and we’ve gone with a sippy cup. He’s starting to get it, except for the fact that he doesn’t want to hold the cup (unless he’s grabbing it, hitting it on the table, and then tossing it off the side of his chair). Instead, he tilts his chin upwards and sucks from the sippy cup like hand feeding a calf a bottle. We’ll get there.

Mateo has been sleeping on his belly since forever. He’s been great on his tummy since shortly after that. He’s trying to pull up on just about everything. And has managed to get into a knee-standing position.

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He prefers standing, initially with assistance, but then holding onto something on his own terms. He thinks EVERY object should be a jumparoo. And though we’ll put him in a crawling position and he’ll rock back and forth, his preferred mode of transportation is scooting.
And like proper parents that will end up paying for therapy because of that hazy sense he’ll have of “my moms had high expectations, but I felt like achieving those goals was always just out of my reach and I can’t shake the feeling as to why”, we reward his mobility by moving the objects farther away.