Month 13

Dear Corbin,

You turned thirteen months old yesterday. To celebrate, Dad cut your hair in the bath again, and you cried and cried about it. Pretty soon, we’ll have to take you to get a real hair cut. Soon. Pretty soon. Any day now.

Your uncle Alex and soon-to-be-aunt Lena came for a visit at the beginning of the month. The last time they saw you, you did nothing but cry, so this visit was much better. It was very nice to see them. We’ll see them again in California in October for their wedding, and we might even get to do some sight-seeing along the way.

The snow all melted this month, and the weather has been sunny and mild. That’s good, because you love being outside. You want to go on walks as often as you can, even if you only walk ten feet before stopping to explore something on the ground. You have brought home a couple of rocks, from your walks with Grandma and Grandpa, so we started a treasure box for you on the front porch. Hopefully that will keep the whole outdoors from coming to live in our house. This past weekend, I was doing some yard work while you were having some outside time. You were mainly playing with the dogs, “throwing” the tennis ball for them and playing with sticks together. I won’t be surprised if by the end of the summer, all you want to do is play in the yard with the dogs. Maybe we can get you your very own kid sized pooper scooper.

Grandma Lam and I went to a big consignment sale of kid’s stuff last week. We found you a summer wardrobe and some outdoor or front porch toys. Based on your love of stomping in puddles, though, what you really need are some rain boots. Your winter boots were waterproof when you were walking in the snow, but they were defeated by the puddle stomping. Hopefully we can find you something before we get any rain.

You have also started figuring out how to climb things. Mainly stairs, of course, but you also try to climb in and out of the tub, and you’ve actually become pretty good at climbing down from the couch. Sometimes when we’re going upstairs for your bath, you make us hold your hands so you can “walk” up the stairs, instead of crawl, and that always makes me laugh.

Other than that, it’s been a pretty quiet month for us. By quiet, though, I really mean uneventful, because you do

have your yelling moments. The other night you were walking laps around the house yelling, just because you thought it was fun. You make a lot of noise, and use a lot of syllables, but you haven’t started talking yet. You haven’t even been interested in using any signs, even ones that you made up yourself. You just do a lot of hooting and pointing, which is only to be expected. One of the books I was reading said that kids your age have more behavior in common with chimpanzees than with adult humans, so I’m not surprised when our interactions go something like this:

You: Hoot! Hoot! [point]

Me: That’s a banana. Ba-na-na.

Love,

Mom