My daughter was already tracking objects with her eyes and lifting her head up before she even left the hospital. She skipped crawling altogether and went straight to walking somewhat late at 13 mos, and then was running maybe 2 weeks later. I don't think the idea of crawling ever occurred to her until she heard my wife talking about how she'd skipped it. By the time she was two she could already throw a ball mostly in the direction she wanted it to go, and she could kick a soccer ball in a straight line every time.
We'd learned about baby signs and figured we'd do that when she got to six months, but she already had a word she could use to tell us what she wanted: "mama," "dada," "baba," "buh-bye," and "nite-nite" were obvious. She'd wave her hand over her nose and say, "phew!" when she needed a change, and she'd created "pasherfir" for her pacifier, since we'd never referred to it as a "binky." We had all the basics covered at 6 months except for "hungry," but a couple months later that was a problem solved when my mom started watching her in the afternoons, and she learned "num-num" from grandma. She had a handful of other words, too, and if she didn't have a word or couldn't make herself understood, she'd just point, and I'd carry her over to whatever her fingers led to.
She played her first prank when she was about four months. I was getting her ready for bed and started changing what I thought was just a wet diaper, then yelled, "BABY!!!" so my wife could bring me the supplies I'd need for the disaster I'd just uncovered. Once I got her cleaned up, my daughter started shouting something unintelligible, and finally my wife stuck her head in, and my daughter busted a gut. It took us a while to figure out she was trying to imitate my "BABY!!!"
When she was two I had my "G*d d*mn" Stupid fishy" moment. My wife had a habit of twisting the car seat straps further every time she traveled, and I'd just placed my daughter in the car seat to find them more mangled than usual. As I was trying to sort them out with my daughter in the way, I whispered, "Damnit" under my breath. She gave me such a mischievous grin and said it back to me with such ferocity that I couldn't help but double over and laugh, in amusement and embarrassment. Of course, now I'd just rewarded the behavior, and so she kept doing it. When she did it for my wife, she laughed, too. The only fair thing to do now was to taper off the reactions slowly, which we did... though not before she'd performed for my holier-than-the-pope grandmother, naturally.
