Today’s the day, can you believe it? Our big boy is 1 year old.

As one always says in posts like this, a year sure goes fast! Oliver has grown up quite a bit in that time.

The words that he reliably says are “Nala” and “book”. He can sign “book”, “milk”, “more” and “all done”, though he is more likely to use his own modified signs for these things; “more” is usually hand clapping, banging a hand on his tray, or gesturing towards his mouth, and “all done” is usually just putting his hands on his head. We haven’t required him to do the signs as rigorously as we did with Evie, so this is probably our fault for not being quite as strict on that. (For example, letting him get away with just banging on the tray for more.)

He does some other “non-official” things as well. He gives hi fives, and he occasionally does “so big!” He loves to point to pictures and say, “Ba ba” which means picture in Oliver’s language. He will occasionally say “ba” for ball or “Ba be” for baby and point to the object in question.

He can crawl really, really fast, on his hands and knees now, as opposed to his long-time belly crawl. He pulls himself up to stand and cruises around furniture, etc. but no first steps yet. I would imagine those would come soon.

Physically, he has 5, going on 6 teeth. He has always been a pretty big boy in terms of percentiles of height and weight, but he never went through a really chubby looking phase. Evie looked chubbier than him, even though she didn’t weigh as much.

He eats pretty much anything you put in front of him. Even if he won’t, you can usually just offer him that thing later, and he’ll eat it. This is a big difference from Evie. Also, another big difference from Evie is that, pretty much the only thing he won’t eat is avocado, which remains one of Evie’s favorite things to this day.

Of course Oliver’s first year was dominated by the whole eczema thing. But that’s pretty much controlled now (by a lengthy, twice-a-day routine). I’m hoping that gets better in year 2, but it is certainly a lot better now than it had been.

So that’s pretty much it. Obviously a couple of paragraphs don’t properly represent the entirety of our smiling, pointing, shrieking, splashing, lovable book monster. But that’s the best I can do at the moment, so it will have to suffice.