As of a few minutes ago, Alex has figured out how to write on a white board with a marker. And how to write on walls. But we won’t talk about that. But he is now drawing! Woo!

Less than two hours from now, at 11:58 UTC (4:58 AM Pacific, 7:58 AM Eastern), Alex will officially turn 11 months old.  Almost a year.  Gulp!  He is such a big boy!

I’ve been bad, I haven’t even posted the highlights video for his 10th month (although it has now been edited and will be on YouTube soon and posted here shortly thereafter), let alone gotten anything ready for the eleventh month which is about to end.  Oh well, I’ll catch up eventually maybe.  And after we hit a year, I’ll do those less frequently than every month anyway.

I’ve also not lately done just a general update on what Alex is doing and such, so here goes:

• As I posted a little over a week ago, Alex is now walking.  We went from a few tentative steps without holding on to anything to toddling all over in the space of a few days.  This means we have a toddler now instead of a baby, and he is of course using his increased mobility to the fullest, and is getting into everything he possibly can.
• He’s also doing the climbing thing, up onto things, down off things, out of laps, up and down stairs.  All with no problem and no fear.  (Even when there should be fear of course, so we watch carefully.)
• His vocabulary is growing slowly but surely.  I am now “Daa Eee”.  There is of course “MaMa” going on too.  And I am pretty sure there is “Aay Eee” for Amy, but Amy doesn’t recognize it as such yet.  And of course “dog”, still his favorite word by far.  And “look”, constantly used while pointing at things he wants to see more of.  And “book”.  We have “clock” as well, but he associates that with the Tix Clock I have in my office instead of a normal clock.  Oops.  There is also now “up”.  And “ball”.  Those are the most common.  I think a few others have made appearances off and on.  (For instance, a handful of times he identified a couple of other animals in one of his games…  a duck and and a goat…  but that just happened a couple of times and didn’t repeat much.)  Oh, and then there are the things for which there are words, just not the right words.  ”Guck” is the fish in his bedroom, but also all fish.  And of course, “ning” has meant milk since long before his first English word (that would be dog I think) started being used.
• He has learned deception, trying to trick us to look the other way or otherwise be distracted before he snatches glasses off our faces.
• He loves the Jeopardy theme song and plays close attention whenever it comes on.
• When certain songs come on he starts to bounce and dance.
• He likes watching Big Bird on TV.  Also other muppets and the occasional cartoon.  Humans, not so much.
• He pushes his own mini shopping cart when we go out shopping.
• He will climb up onto my lap and put his head down on my chest when he is ready to go to sleep.
• He loves pushing buttons and has tried multiple times to send faxes on our printer.  If we actually had the printer hooked up to a phone line, he would have succeeded.  We get the confirmation pages saying tit tried to send a fax but failed.  He has however made a variety of copies using the copy feature.
• He gets super happy and excited when I get home from work, jumping up and down and squealing and getting himself to where I am as fast as he can manage.
• When he finds things that we have taken away from him in the past, he picks them up, then yells at us to get our attention and hands them to us.
• He feeds the dog all the time.  Roscoe and Alex are quickly becoming best friends.  Lately, he has been going up to the dog, giving him a big hug, then resting his head on Roscoe’s side.
• In general he is a happy healthy little boy, doing all the things you would expect at this age.  And having a blast doing them.  He has so much fun!

Anyway, eleven months now.  One more month until his first birthday.  Wow.  And there is that whole thing where somehow it simultaneously feels like it was just yesterday that we brought him home as a tiny baby and that he has been here forever and how could there possibly ever have been a world without him.  I guess that is how these things go.