Birthday boy!

My little baby boy is one year old. In some ways it has gone quickly, but in other regards it has been the longest year of my life - it seems an eternity ago since he was born. He'll never grow or change so much in just one short year again.

James is still sleeping through the night fairly reliably, hooray! He normally goes to sleep at about 7.30 and wakes up anywhere between 5.30am and 7.30am. Since last week I have taken to feeding him when he wakes up and then putting him back in his cot (with some toys), and more often than now he actually goes back to sleep! We have had three mornings where he's slept till almost 9am. He is just transitioning from two naps to one nap, so he's making up the sleep in the mornings (just what we wanted!). It still does seem like a huge amount of sleep - last night he slept for about 13 hours, and he has been asleep for over 1.5 hours so far this afternoon. I guess he must need it. [of course he woke up as I typed that]

James is now crawling at top speed, and has not learnt about going round obstacles - he finds a way across every obstacle in his path. He also pulls himself to standing on anything which stays still long enough. Tonight he took his first wobbly steps with the baby walker; it won't be long till he's speeding up and down the corridor with that.

We have more teeth! Three little top incisors with the fourth not far behind.

Still not quite dropped that lunchtime feed - in fact over the last few days since an attack of gastroenteritis James has been subsisting rather more on milk than on food. I am very proud to have made it to a year still breastfeeding, and I was very grateful to be able to breastfeed him when he couldn't keep anything else down last weekend. I spent a day at work earlier in the month and James was fine without a feed without me around, so I'm not too worried about how he'll cope at nursery.

Current favourite toys: stacking cups (as ever), electronic things that make noises, shape sorters, blocks and things to bang. Current favourite games: posting tapes and videos through the stairgate bars, posting remote controls, toys and other random household items through the cat flap, crawling races with Mummy or Daddy.

Words: mama, daddy, dat, cat, hiya (sort of).

Things we did this month: met two tiny babies of friends, bought a new front-facing car seat, packed away the Graco travel system and started just using the little Maclaren.

Next month: how close will he be to walking? Will he have any more words?