Linnaeus 16.1

I can't get over how quickly Sprout has started talking. His understanding of words has been gradually growing & he clearly knows many more words & phrases than he can say. He has been babbling away for a year now, but it wasn't until recently he started saying Mama & Papa. His other words have gradually appeared one by one. It's a funny process--I'm now carefully listening to everything he's saying to try to identify consistent patterns of sound in there. He'll often copy me but then won't use the word on his own later, like with 'fan'. He'll point at the ceiling & I'll say 'fan', & he'll often repeat, 'fffaaah'. Then when I point at it & ask him what it is, he won't use the word. He'll sometimes say something that sounds vaguely like a word but then refuse to repeat it, so I can't really be sure he's talking or if it was just coincidence that he spat out the right vowel & consonant combo. Some of his words are monosyllabic utterances, like bah, doh, beh, dah, aiee, dok, nom but some are more complex like 'hello', beh-beh, anyah (this seems to mean 'give me that'), ah-doh. New this week: tee (tree), beh (bear), tktk (tickle)

GOOD morning!

Sprout's favourite activity this week is climbing up to stand on a low table in the living room so he can see out the window. I know this is not exactly the safest thing for him to be doing, but he really loves to look out at the birds, dogs & people going by. (I'll have to figure out a better way for him to see out the windows in the summer when they're open.) He delights in identifying the things that he hears & starts laughing & repeating beh beh when things go beep, like trucks & Handi-Darts backing up, car alarms or horns honking. He seems very attuned to sounds & always notices when we can hear a dog or bird or horn from inside the house. Maybe that's why dog was his first animal word, rather than cat, because he hears them more these days.

I should probably say that Sprout's favourite activity is climbing anything, really. He loves getting on & off his ride on toys & his friend Aiden's rocking horse (can't wait until he sees his rocking moose at Christmas!) & will sit on anything that seems like it might work as a stool, like a cube of duplo, bolster pillow, or a case of pasta. He climbs on the kitchen chairs & stands on the seat, facing the back, dancing on his precarious perch or trying to get onto the table. He regularly climbs onto the toilet lid & then attempts to scale the counter top whenever we don't have the gate on the bathroom. Our bed, the couch & the chair in his room are favourites too. I'm just waiting for the day he figures out how to swing his leg over the edge of his crib. So far, I think his sleep sack impedes such an escape.

After about a week of having the tummy bug that was going around, he's back to his ravenous self, eating near-adult sized portions & breastfeeding more to make up for the days he wasn't too hungry. I suppose it could be another growth spurt--I'll check his weight sometime soon. I have to remember to feed him snacks more often. He tends to remind me by going into the kitchen & trying to open a box of crackers himself, or just grabbing an apple. He asks to have chocolate from the advent calendar every time he's in the kitchen. Although he doesn't quite seem to understand the concept of 'not til tomorrow', he generally seems happy with the one daily chocolate he gets.

Another development on the eating front is soup: Sprout is getting quite good at using a cup, so I fed him soup. He drank three helpings (about 250mL worth, probably) with hardly any spillage & dipped his crackers in it too. It was so much fun watching him eat like a big boy that I had to take a few pictures...