Basically, he seems to have two tracks of development going on, one in which he's doing things in a normal developmental sequence, a bit earlier than most kids do, but nothing extreme: he matches an "average" 12 month old most of the time (at 9mos), but sometimes, usually for about a half hour a day (not necesarly all in one block) he seems to kinda hit a stride, and then he does things that are all over the map in terms of normal development... there's no rhyme or reason to it at all. An example is that he can generally walk a couple of steps at a time. But since about 7 months, he's walked a significant distance about once or twice a week. When he takes off walking, he walks like an older toddler, when he takes a couple of steps, he moves like a baby. It was confusing when he was doing the "breakthrough" walking, but not yet actually walking... It's still a bit confusing....
Yes, I can very much understand this. At 9 months our pediatrician said that DD was about on par for an average 12-13 month old. When she was at 12 months she was closer to a 18month old so we've seen her progression accelerate since then. There were some things that she was quite a bit ahead on, for instance, her imagination/pretend play. Also before she was even walking she was able to walk up and down stairs by herself by just holding onto the railing. Ironically, now that she's a pro at walking/running she can't go up the stairs as well!
I actual can think of a number of examples where DD was "reading ahead" as you put it. Another example was that DD started talking at 6 months. She could say about 5-6 words and had about the same number of signs. But then she's just never talked consistently. Now she's 13 months and has a vocab of 30+ words but still isn't talking consistently and only uses a handful of those words on a daily basis. She's even used some short sentences but again, not often. However, she has a HUGE receptive vocab and is able to convey pretty much everything she wants through pointing, grunting, etc. and answer our questions/commands. My mom said I was the same and just started talking in full sentences someday so maybe DD will do the same? Who knows... I think a big part of it is that she just has so many things going on and is interested in so many different things that she's not just developing one skill at a time. DD's always been very interested in developing her gross/fine motor skills besides just her vocab so I think that probably plays a big role too. She's also become obsessed with words/letters/numbers lately. 2
I think I'm following what you are pondering and saw similar patterns with my DD when she was a baby. Even before she walked she was kicking and throwing balls.
That's so funny. DD was the same way. At about 8 months? we had a toy mouse that we'd throw to our cat and she'd play fetch with it. Well, around that time DD started to throw the mouse to our cat.
We've also played soccer at home since DD was really young! I'm *hoping* that she'll follow in my footsteps and play (definitely NOT going to force it, but one can hope, right?).
