Erik Is ONE Year Old!

He loves to escape while I am changing his diaper. He started that when he was not even walking yet. So funny, seeing him escape and expecting me to follow him, while he almost falls over because he is laughing so hard. He has been walking since he was almost 10mo and is working on running now. He started crawling at 6mo, and from that time on, nothing was safe anymore. He also started his own solids by crawling underneath the kitchen table and feasting on the food that had fallen there.

He is still nursing a lot too though. He has figured out the 'pull on shirt till mom opens it' technique and is working really really hard on his routines for the olympic freestyle nursing. He has mastered the 'hanging upside down from moms shoulder nurse' and is now working on his 'making a 360 degrees rotation while nursing' but keeps losing the breast while doing that.

He has six teeth now and has had them for quite a while. At 6mo, he got his first two teeth. Those were the to be expected bottom middle ones. But his second set, at 7mo was weirder. Because he got the OUTSIDE upper ones! So he looked like count Dracula for a while LOL. I remember at least 2 of my girls doing the same, so I was not worried, but it sure looked funny! A few weeks later he got the ones in between and we haven't seen any new ones since then. He is able to eat anything with those six teeth! No food is safe from him. We never did baby food for him, just waited till he was able to handle finger foods and took it from there. He totally self feeds, including smearing yoghurt all over his body... He isn't signing as much as my other kids were, but that is mostly because he is pretty verbal and I haven't really been doing signs enough with him. He says yes, no, mama, bye bye and other simple words like that. He is doing some signs, even did the nursing sign when he saw himself nursing on a picture. So cute!

He loves checking out what his siblings are doing and joining into the fun if possible. He is good in grabbing toys from others and in defending himself when somebody else wants his toy. Biting seems to be his first line of defense, closely followed by hitting. Still quite a lot of room for improvement in the interpersonal relationship skills!

Neat to see his emotional life develop too. Lately he has been very jealous if one of use carries Kate. We are not supposed to do that, or at least if we do it, he wants to be there with her! So Kate will climb on my lap, he wants to be there too. When I want to be able to still reach the computer, I hand Kate over to Sander, which makes Erik go off my lap and run over to Sander to be on his lap too :-)

newborn	1 wo	1 mo	2 mo	3 mo

4 mo	5 mo	6 mo	7 mo	8 mo

9 mo	10 mo	11 mo	12 mo	1 yo

His birthday was a fun day. Not only was it Erik's first birthday, but also the day that our family turned ONE HUNDRED! ( 35 + 35 + 10 + 8 + 5 + 4 + 2 + 1 = 100 ) So I made 2 cakes, a big one with 100 and all the ages on it, and a small one-shaped one as personal cake for Erik. He loved it and enjoyed eating it. I was surprised that he was able to blow out his own candle. I don't think any of my other ones managed to do that on their first birthday.

The opening of his birthday presents was still kind of beyond him. He was sitting on the couch, surrounded by siblings trying to push presents onto him and he just leaned back and enjoyed all the excitement. Luckily his siblings were more than happy to help him unwrap and he got them all unwrapped that way. He liked playing with them, but after a while his attention turned to other things and his siblings could fight over his new toys LOL.

Since it was his birthday, I got the walker out again, that he used to love, but that was being used as a race car for him by the other kids. He just loved loved loved it, he immediately sat in it and made clear that somebody had to push him. So the others obliged him and pushed him around lots of the day. I remembered again why I put the walker away in the first place and yelled 'No running in the house!!!!!!' a lot :-)