Amanda gets a weekly baby development e-mail, and last week it mentioned that a 13-month-old is increasingly able to understand what you say, even if they can’t communicate back very well. In fact, we’ve started to notice this a lot lately. Amanda gave an example, where she’ll say something like “Go find your Dad and he’ll take you outside!” and Adria will indeed go off to hunt me down.

This evening in her bath, I asked “Adria, are you almost done with your bath?” She shook her head in a distinctively negative way, and said “No!” without even looking up from her toys.

She is also starting to “invent” her own sign language. They are classic gestures, of course, but she was never actually taught these things and picked them up on her own. For example, she throws her arms up in the air to be picked up. She points at things that she wants. She looks back at me and holds one or more of her hands up in the classic ‘take my hand’ gesture if she comes upon steps or uncertain terrain.

She will even ‘ask permission’ with her eyes when she wants to touch something and she has some reason to believe it is dangerous or off-limits. She will put her hand out towards the thing (I’m thinking of a particular instance where it was a remote control on the coffee table) but not quite touch it, and then look back with a sly grin that says “I’m going to grab this, Dad, unless you say not to in the next few seconds…” And believe it or not, if I tell her “not for babies", she’ll leave it alone. (I’m thinking I shouldn’t get too used to this, especially if the next baby is a boy?)