Alex's White Christmas

Alex Eating Strange Things...

Vocabulary

Slowly but surely Alex is expanding his vocabulary. His most favorite word contintinues to be "ba" for ball (or bal in Dutch), and he likes to go around the house and addressing many things that are not balls as "ba". But he also says "bo" for boom (i.e., tree), but he also uses that for book. "Duh" in Alex talk means door, and "duh do" seems to mean deur dicht (door closed). To top it all of, he also says "Ale" every now and then, and we were amused to hear him say "Ale ba" when he picked up a ball.

And what about "mama" and "papa" to address his parents? Well, he can make the sounds and does so every now and then, but he has not yet used these words to address us....

Even though his spoken vocabulary is still small, he is quite good at understanding both Rob's Dutch and Cindy's English. He understands the difference between geef de bal aan papa and gooi de bal naar papa (give/throw the ball to daddy), and he knows very well what things like "No, not in your mouth", "Stop", "Well done", "Yeah", "High five!" mean.

Food

Seeing Alex eat is quite interesting. For a brief while, he used the pincer grasp to pick up food, but these days he seems to think that such a technique is a waste of time. In a world where there are things to explore and games to repeat, an efficient transportation mechanism from table to mouth is of the utmost importance. Alex's solution is to smack his hand on the table (this presmashes the food cutting down on chewing time), grab a fistful, and jam it into his mouth. Even though fast, this process is not very efficient, and about half of the food ends up within a three feet radius of Alex.

His favorite foods are pasta, potatoes, bread, chicken, salmon, and cheese. His least favorite foods are fruit and vegetables. He used to like those until about a month ago, but his enthusiasm when he sees broccoli is not what it used to be. Our solution to this is to start his dinner with the things that are his least favorite, because once the good stuff hits the table, there is no way to get him to eat his veggies. He will resort to the pincer grasp to delicately pick the yummies and leave the yuckies, or he may choose to use his favorite smash and grasp technique to bring a mix of food to his mouth, and follow up with some processing until moments later the interlopers are expelled.

Alex has several ways to let us know he is done eating. His most gently way of letting us know is to shake his head and then turn away when we offer him a bite. Slightly less gently is his moaning and screaming. Third, our least favorite and his most favorite, is the 'windshield wipe', where he moves both arms in tandem to wipe the food off the table. We actively discourage him from doing this, but when we say "Stop!" and grab his arms, he starts laughing and apparently thinks we are playing a game!

Games

Alex has a dazzling array of toys to play with, and he usually manages to play with most of his toys during a typical weekend day. The result of this is that at the end of the typical weekend day the house looks like a battlefield, with toys all over the place!

Still, he has a few favorite toys. He loves to play with balls, from the smallest to the largest. He loves to pick them up and throw them. One move he particularly likes, is to take a big ball, hold it over his head and then slowly let it drop behing him.

Another of his favorite toys is our saladspinner. Whenever he enters the kitchen, there are two things he does. First he opens the cabinets with the pots and pans and plays with those for a while, and then he moves on to the saladspinner, which has lots of features he likes. If you press the middle, things start spinning. If you take the lid off, there is bowl inside a bowl, and you can take it out and put it back in. The inner bowl is nice and light, and is great for putting on your head. Then there is the fun part of trying to get the lid to go back onto the outer bowl, or inner bowl, and finally there is the great fun of throwing any of the parts of the salad spinner on the floor and make as much noise as possible.

A great way he likes to spend his time is opening and closing doors. He likes to go into his bedroom or into the study and close the door behind him. We then ask "Where is Alex?", and he opens the door laughing as we say "There he is!". He likes this game so much he can easily do it ten times before he gets bored.

Walking

Alex is getting better and better at walking. He has moved on from the Frankenstein stage where he did not bend his legs to the stage where is totally confident walking and drinks or eats while he is walking. He is not 100 percent sure-footed, and every now and then he falls, either backward onto his butt, or forward (as you can see in this picture).

Alex's First Birthday

For this special occasion we created a electronic guestbook. Even though his birthday has already passed, we would still like to invite you to visit our guestbiok and leave a greeting, a wish or a message for Alex!

Changes to this Website in the Past Month

Dec 31 Added Alex's White Christmas and Alex is Eating Strange Things... to this homepage.
Dec 15 Added, a new closeup.
Dec 9 Major update, with this new homepage, new pictures, new length, weight and head circumference, new artwork, a comparison between one year old Cindy, Rob and Alex, and Alex's first birthday.
Nov 19 Added pictures of Alex eating his birthday cake on this homepage.
Nov 17 Added new first things, and a electronic guestbook, and we invite you to send a greeting to Alex.

Next major update: Feb 15, 2003

Do you think you may have missed something? Check our list of previous homepages. If you want to be informed when this website has been updated, send an email to webmaster@robandcindy.net.