Riku at 10 months!

The first 6 weeks of this year have gone past in a blur so I managed to miss Riku's 9 month post completely. There have been so many developments and changes in the last 2 months that it will be hard to document them all properly, but I'll list some of them here in bullet point form:

• He is now cruising around furniture like a pro and has no problems letting go, sitting down again and crawling off after whatever has caught his eye. We got him an activity table and he loves to stand at it and push or spin things.
• Just a very few times he has used one hand to pull himself up and then tentatively let go- he can actually stand by himself but doesn't seem to like the feeling much or perhaps lacks confidence so he always sits back down very quickly. It won't be long though I'm sure!
• About 3 weeks ago he started pointing at things that interest him- these are often mobiles or other things hanging from the ceiling which he is particularly interested in at the moment.
• His "vocab" has increased a lot in the last month and he has really branched out from the "dadada", "bababa" and "mumumum" which were 95% of his repertoire at the end of last year! He has also started "singing" and has quite a wide vocal range :)
• He is finally starting to show more of an interest in food- he is particularly fond of rice and scarfed down huge amounts of sticky rice while in Thailand as well as scrambled eggs, dragon fruit, mandarins and fruit shakes. He also likes onigiris, sekihan and risottos which he has been managing to feed to himself with a spoon quite successfully the last week- he hadn't eaten from a spoon for quite a while because he refused to be fed with one and if I gave him the spoon less than 1% of the food ever made it into his mouth, so I decided to wait until he was a bit more coordinated to try again and just let him have finger foods until then. Well, finally he has reached the point where he can hold a spoon in more or less the right direction and get a lot of the food into his mouth!
• He now has both "vampire teeth" (actually lateral incisors) but they are coming through quite slowly so I think his left front incisor, which started coming through about 2 weeks ago, will catch up soon and the right one won't be too far behind.
• He is getting a lot more agile in general and especially in the hotel room in Thailand showed a lot of skill at climbing on, off and over things. Perhaps because of the bigger bed at the hotel or the warm weather he rolled around a lot more at night there and sometimes even slept on his tummy, which he hadn't done since he was a tiny newborn. He has started flopping over backwards from sitting when he knows he is on a soft surface- he thinks it's hilarious and it makes a good game to play with him, as long as he doesn't try it on the wooden floor!
• I have seen him try to put the plastic shapes into the holes in his shape sorter ball even when playing by himself, and if I help him he will make quite good attempts at it- this kind of thing really makes me realise how quickly he is growing up!
• He can roll a ball back to you if you roll it to him- even a month ago he would just randomly bat the ball in any direction but now he can roll it consistently back towards the person opposite him.

I'm sure there's more but that's probably enough for now! We are also going to baby signing classes this year which I'll do a separate post for soon.