Whilst marinated tofu seems to satiate Freya, yesterday she was completey taken by garlic and chilli Portabello mushrooms. Looks like I’ll have to watch more Jamie Oliver programs if this is the kind of food she wants.

We’re gladdened that Freya has began to eat more food recently. For ages she would only take a few spoons of food at mealtimes, but certainly didn’t seem to suffer from it.

Her favourite food (this week, anyway) is, of all things, tofu. Cut it up into small pieces and put it in front of her, and she’ll happily sit there shoveling it in. Since tofu is weel-known for being an excellent source of protien and calcium (amongst other things) we’re extremely pleased.

We’ve been aware for some time that Freya has the ability to recognise “Mummy” and “Daddy”, and is even, in her limited way, able to mimic these words whilst associating them to us. However, yesterday was a major breakthrough in articulation.

She has an picture book of animals, which I read to her tonight. As I flicked through the book, in between Freya eating it, I said the name of the animal, and what it says e.g. “Kitten. A kitten says meow.”

The first few times I read the book out loud, she watched eagerly. Then, I showed her the pictures again, and asked “What does a XXX say?” She responded with remarkable results.

Whilst her attempts to mimic “dog”,”woof, woof”,”duck” and “quack, quack” sounded similar, when we came to cat, she opened her mouth wide and made a pretty reasonable sound. The same with the tiger’s “grrr”, and the elephant’s….whatever it is that elephants say.

It is truly fantastic to experience one’s child doing what children have been doing for thousands of years.

I don’t know exactly when it happened, but Freya has started to crawl.

For a few months she’s been trying, with little success, to make her way around. I don’t know why, but I’d imagined it would suddenly happen: a definite instance where I could say, “Now she can crawl.” It didn’t work out like that. It has happened slowly, with Freya taking one or two shuffles here and there.

Meanwhile, she has taken her first step walking without aid. She can also stand, sometimes, for 10 or so seconds.

Freya has been improving her dance-steps these last few weeks. Not only can she swing her pants to all kinds of music, by bouncing up and down, but she has now combined that move with a hand clap on the thigh.

To selected music – preferably hard trance/NRG – she is perfecting the hands in the air move (or more correctly the pointing finger in the air).