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It's been a quiet month of December in some ways. For various reasons we've been sticking close to home. It's also been a month of big events: Matt finished his second semester of teaching, to a mixture of satisfaction and relief. Ruth Ann has left her job, wrapping up 5-1/2 very accomplished years as Executive Director of Rebuilding Together San Francisco.
And Jonah Baer turned two years old on December 14, wrapping up a year of mind-boggling change. Everyone who's ever been a parent seems to tell you that kids really grow up fast -- and let me tell you something: they aren't kidding! It's hard to fathom that just about a year ago Jonah was truly an infant -- just learning to crawl with competence, not yet saying anything we recognized as a word. In the relatively short span of a year, he's learned:
* To walk, then run (so much so that now it often seems he's got only two speeds: stop and running full speed!)
* To talk up a storm, stringing four or more words together at a clip.
* To recognize shapes -- circles, squares and stars -- and colors (albeit less reliably) -- red, yellow, green and his favorite purple.
* To begin to count by numbers -- one, two, three... although more often than not skipping around... three, seven, eight.
Even in just the last few weeks his communication skills have seemed to grow leaps and bounds. I can't quite put my finger on it, but it feels like in some ways his talking has become, well, more "grown up." I think it's not just the words he says, but the growing intelligence that is clearly at work in the background -- for example, he often links concepts: sees the picture of scissors and says "haircut"; or (my recent favorite) hears "mac and cheese" and says "Karen and Mac" (Mac being Karen's dog). For a being who couldn't get out a single-syllable word a year ago, this is truly rocket science -- what have any of the rest of us done in the last year that compares!
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