Day: March 22, 2006

Talking and Playing

After the first video of Leilani talking, she quickly stopped sticking out her tongue when vocalizing. She still makes mostly the same ahhs and ohhs, sometimes with a few other multisyllables. But she does it several times a day, sometimes when interacting with us, sometimes on her own.

In this video, she is playing in her new “gym” that we had to buy for her after she liked Ian’s so much. I’m a bit ambivalent about surrounding her with bright, colorful and noisy playthings, sometimes she seems over-stimulated. But maybe that’s what she needs to develop motor skills, because she definitely interacts with it more than anything else before. She’s absorbing new sensations and learning new motions all the time, so she probably gets frustrated at not being able to do everything she wants. Imagine if every motion was new and you had to practice and learn it.

Flipping Over

Leilani has been squirming and trying to move about more and more. First, she started arching her back and tilting her head back. Then she figured out how to push with the top leg which usually rolls her over on her side. After that, she found out that bringing her head and leg back forward will roll her body and flip her onto her stomach. Finally she realized she needed to get the bottom arm out of the way and she would then be in a position to start crawling. Sometimes we’d help her out with one of these steps, but most of the actions seemed innate.

Earlier this week, she got all the motions in smooth sequence and flipped over in a few seconds by herself. A few days later she did it again so I grabbed the video camera and asked her to do it again, which she did! This is the original live audio for this video.