Rollin' along

Where to start? Since the last post Juno has seemingly grown into a little girl - the days of being a baby are definitely over. She wanders about the house, mimicking everything that Jess and I do.

Jess was sweeping the floor the other day so Juno rushed into the kitchen and grabbed the little broom that she has and began industriously swiping at the floor. When I put my tie on in the mornings, the little bug stands there beside me tucking her little cuddly under her chin and then wandering around looking very pleased with herself.

She also makes a point of what looks to be pointing nappies on cuddly, that is, placing her change mat in the middle of the floor and carefully arranging cuddly on it before wrapping him up and proudly carrying him around for both Jess & myself to inspect and make the appropriate approving noises.

Her vocabulary has similarly grown, and has her command of the language emerges, so too the gestural vocabulary that accompanies it. Quite a few things in the house are designated with an open palm thrust toward them and the word 'hot' (it sounds closer to hā, but we all get the drift.)


The clincher for me was a couple of weekends ago as I walked back up the steps (I had been outside for all of 10 mins, Juno came rushing towards me, screaming excitedly "dad-ee, dad-ee." First cars at 16 are made of this stuff...

Speaking of cars, Juno has now mastered vehicular transport. Margam bought her this little lady-bug to ride last time she was down. She has now mastered the mount & the dismount and manages to cover quite a bit of ground, either around the living room or out on one of the decks.

[You will need Quicktime to view the video]

The blur

Since the last post, Juno is now walking exclusively. In other words, if she falls over rather than continue to her destination by crawling, she will now stand up and keep tottering on. She has an interesting technique as well: this involves hunching her shoulders (for balance?), pointing both of her index fingers in the direction she is heading, and rolling from side to side as she walks like she is crossing the deck of a ship rounding the Horn. The combined effect is rather like James Cagney as a gunslinger advancing down the middle of the street towards his adversary... more video to come.

Her vocabulary is also increasing at an astonishing rate. She now has mum, ma (with a hard 'a' for max), up, hello, da (which is a variant of ta, or thanks) and bye - the last rather delightfully accompanied with a very limp wristed, yet regal, wave. The words she understands, however, run into the dozens. You can mention the oddest things, things that you don't really expect to be part of her world, and she will look around for them and point at them with an excited 'Aa' when she spots them.

Mum has been over this weekend and can't quite get over how much she has grown up and changed. If I look back over the posts and photos since we were in Oz in february, I suppose it would be more apparent to me too. As it is, it really just moves at such speed that it is something of a blur.

Walking

It is funny, but you are conditioned to think that there is something momentous about your child's first steps -and understandably so. What they don't tell you, however, is that she won't just get up from a sitting position one day and wander across the room to pick up her cuddly. It all happens so naturally that, truth be told, paying as much attention as I was, I just sort of, well, missed it.

Not missed it completely as in I come home from work one day and Juno walks up to give me a kiss, but missed it in the sense that you watch so intently for something, try and determine exactly when the first steps take place, distinguish from all the other developmental stages where she is merely standing, or experimenting with shifting her balance, moving around the room holding on to fixtures, that you dissect and discard such a range of movements, refine your definition of what exactly it is 'to walk' that finally one day -in the face of all the evidence- you are forced to say, well hey: now she is walking. And she is. I will put some video up on miromiro.com in the coming days.

Her confidence is building day-by-day and she continues to experiment. Once she has successfully completed a particular manoeuvre she will repeat it ad nauseum, getting the full range of movement down. Getting on and off the sofa, or down from the bed are part of that repertoire now, as she expands the circle of chaos around her... But there is that moment, when she completes the sequence and turns to you, her face radiant with delight at her accomplishment and the desire to share that joy with you, and you just burst with love, and pride, and the childish thrill of it all.

Walking? I'm floating.

The gene game

What do you reckon? Where does Juno get her fair looks, her winsome charm and her studied intelligence? My money is on that handsome looking devil lurking under the japanese maple. Talk about an art shot: deck the kid out in his sunday best and send him out into the garden to squat under a tree for a couple of hours while a professional (read 'suburban') photographer snaps off roll after roll of black & white... It's just a good thing that the kid is so damn photogenic.

Speaking of which, I have finally posted some videos of Juno to our site. There are a couple of crackers - if I do say so myself. The final one, Trolley Girl, shows her behind the wheels of her birthday present from Brian. She is a Hutt Valley natural: takes charge of the vehicle, points it vaguely in the direction she wants to go in, floors it and hopes for the best.

When she inevitably crashes into something, she reverses an inch or two and showing all the damned intransigence steely determination her parents are known for, slams straight back into the obstacle again. And again. Hasn't quite got the gist of the three-point turn yet. It does make my eyes water, needles to say, when she heads for the speakers...

I'll try and post some snaps of her in a black Holden t-shirt for the afficionados out there.

Birthday girl

There it is: One Year Old! How about that? Looking back on the past 12 months has proved to be a lot harder than I imagined. One, there are the astonishingly large gaps in my memory that are probably due more to sleep deprivation than to certain dubious pursuits in my 20's (and 30's, truth be told), and two, it has all just happened so damned fast.

I was looking through the photos we have taken of the little bug over the last 12 months -for a sort of retrospective that you can view here- when the enormity of the change started to dawn on me: she is practically unrecognizable in the photos from the first day or so.

Anyway, we had a bit of a shindig on sunday: had Inde & Macy from the antenatal group round (bit like Juno's first class reunion, actually) and the whanau for some afternoon tea. We dined on delicious banana cake covered in chocolate icing, asparagus rolls (apparently it is a kiwi/Grouden tradition), but the appeal is totally lost on me, brandy snaps, fruit covered in chocolate mousse, you get the idea...

Juno (and the rest of the nippers) got home baked sourdough bread spread with unhulled tahini. Sweetheart, when you are reading this in 20 years time just remember, this was your mum's idea.

Music lover

I posted a while back about how much Juno loves music - and, don't get me wrong, this is a very good thing: I wholeheartedly support her interest in the arts... However, can you imagine what it is like to get home after a hard day at the office, to take off you coat and tie and wander upstairs to see the two girls that light up your life and make every day of mind (and, as the Americans say, ass)-numbing drudgery worth it, to find your little girl appreciating your cd collection like this?


There she is, grinning at the sound of her dad's weary tread upon the stair, surrounded by what? 10 or 15 years of your beloved music collection, hurled from one end of the room to the other? Yep, the Japanese imports, the expensive boxed sets, the vestiges of youthful rebellion (the staunch indie pop stuff and the hard core freakout rock), all dispersed in a radial fashion around the indescribably gorgeous little force of destruction.

And it is not like it is intentional. She is actually having fun. That's right, dad's cds are actually great fun to remove (very carefully, nay delicately) from the shelves, inspect both sided attentively, studying the photography and -in the case of some of the more obscure jazz?- the liner notes, before deftly flinging over one's left shoulder and moving on to the next.

Oh, for the days of 8-track...