growing baby

Mateo understands more and more.  He definitely says mama, papa and something gato-ish now.  He can also almost always correctly identify mama vs papa–even in a photo album.  He can also point correctly to a variety of words (in Spanish, perhaps in Russian too–Ilya?) like: books, heater, star, ball, in addition to moon, fan, cat, mama and papa.  He’s starting to be able to follow directions: I can say (in Spanish) let’s go to the washing machine, and he’ll follow me to the washing machine.  Once he led to the washing machine but got confused because I had to take a detour to drop something off in the bathroom.  If I say, do you want to read a book, then Mateo will walk to his bookshelf (if he’s in the mood to read).  Mateo also understands “no” and he’ll wave his hand back and forth to indicate “no-no.”  This doesn’t necessarily mean that he won’t try to do whatever that no-no is, though.  In general, we try not to say no unless it’s a dangerous thing for him to do–and, even then, we try to redirect him as much as possible to something that is ok to do.

One of Mateo’s no-no’s is climbing the oven.  There’s a drawer underneath our oven with a handle–Mateo will step on the drawer handle and hang on to the oven door handle (that opens the oven) and bounce up and down.  This is definitely a no-no!  Even though the oven’s locked, Mateo could still fall, not to mention getting far too perilously close to the stovetop burners.  (He can’t turn the burners on, though, because we put child safety lids over the burner controls.)

So instead we put bought an indoor climbing set/house that we put in his bedroom.  It has a small slide, but Mateo’s not good at sliding down yet.  Instead he climbs UP the slide, and then turns around and steps off the platform on the other end.  He hasn’t figured out that the walls are climbable yet (one wall has holes and the other wall has a steplike side), but I’m sure he’ll have fun exploring that down the line.