My 9yodd was born a month early. The doctors thought she might have been a little earlier than they had originally calculated because of some of the difficulties she had in the NICU. She smiled while still in the NICU and would calm immediately upon hearing my voice even when getting an IV changed (the nurses thought that and the way she looked right at people completely alert was amazing).
Her gross motor skills were not all that advanced unless you adjust for her prematurity...sat at 5 months, crawled on hands and knees at 7months, crawled on hands and feet like a crab at 10 months, and walked a week after her 1st birthday. She was potty trained for bowel movements at 11.5 months.
Her speech was more advanced...she said her first "word" at 4 months old (we called breastfeeding ninny and she would cry nin-nin when hungry) soon followed by mama and dada, had 12 words at 6 months and began signing, had over 50 word vocabulary plus over 50 signs and putting words together by 9 months, memorized whole books at 11 months, "read" them back to me, and sang songs in tune. She spoke in multi-word sentences using adjectives, adverbs, and pronouns correctly at 16 months. By 18 months she continued to memorize every book I read to her more than once and had a huge song repertoire though sometimes the words she thought someone was singing were very funny. She spoke like an adult by the time she was 20 months old using complex sentence structure and a huge vocabulary. She never really "babbled" as a baby and was always easily understood and very clear with her speaking.
Her fine motor skills were advanced as well...she wrote her name at 16 months and me other fine motor milestones at least twice as fast as average.
