13 months

I've been inspired by some of Luca's cyberfriends who post monthly updates on how their babies are doing. So, for the 2nd year of Luca's life, I am going to try to document once a month (too bad I didn't do this last year). Thanks to Amy and Anya who I am shamelessly copying!
So, here are some highlights from the last month.
Growth
Luca is training to become a supermodel--tall and thin. He is 32 inches tall (over 75%ile) but only 20 lbs 2 oz (7 %ile). One funny thing that happened was that apparently his head circumference has shrunk from his 9 month to 12 month visit. The nurse assures us that this is all about how inaccurate any of these measures are. Anyways it is right around 47cm, which is around 50%ile.
He also has at least 10 teeth (getting harder to count the ones in the back now!)--4 top and 4 bottom in the middle, plus at least 2 molars in the back. yay baby!
Locomotion
Luca still is on all fours most of the time. I think he just likes to zip around in crawling mode and finds the idea of balancing and walking too time consuming. He has stood up and taken steps ONE TIME, and then promptly stopped doing that. On the other hand, he is definitely turning into quite the little monkey. He loves climbing up and down the stairs, onto his little toy table, and especially onto and off the couch. This makes Mom and Dad's life harder since now we really can't leave him unattended.
Speech
Luca is also definitely experiencing a language explosion. He talks all the time now, and it is funny to hear the kinds of words he likes to say. The all time favorite (loved by me, Agnish, Joanne, and Luca) is "salsa". Other words he enjoys are camel, waffle, water, socks, sun, lemon, dog, ball, lion, eggs (in Chinese) and "hug me" (in Chinese), clock (which is anything electronic with flashing lights), mama (which is me, or any complaint), and dada (which is Agnish or anything that he wants). He also does a very cute thing with Joanne where she asks him (in Chinese) if he is a good boy or not, and he replies "good boy!", then she asks him if he is naughty or not ("Naughty!") and if he smells good or not ("I smell good!")--same for 'stinky' and 'conceited'.
Eating
Luca ate extremely well when we were in Miami, and then promptly returned to his non-eating ways when we got back from Seattle. Maybe he is hibernating in the wintertime. Right now, he is on an orzo, waffles and yo-baby diet (obviously a carb addict). he still has about 15-25 oz of milk a day, and approximately one jar of food 3x a day.
Dislikes include eating anything, diaper changes, wearing socks, being forced to walk, not being allowed to hold glass objects or coffee mugs,and saying goodbye to mom and dad in the morning.
Likes include giving kisses, balls (still), liquids (still), Elmo (which he disturbingly calls "mama"), dogs (still), reading, pointing, and dancing.

Two other adorable things are (1) when I ask him, "Luca do you want a bath?" he drops everything he is doing, crawls over to our bathroom fast as he can, and pulls himself up to the bathtub to see if there is "wawa" inside--if so, he gets excited and starts trying to take his clothes off and (2) makes this adorable gesture where he reaches up with one open hand and says "light!"--as if he is a tiny god. (kind of hard to explain, I will try to catch it on video one day).

Whew! That's it. I wonder if I will be this verbose every month?! Today, Luca is leaving the US for the first time (we're off to Vancouver for the weekend).