Linnaeus 17.2

Sprout is gradually walking more, though he still crawls if he wants to get anywhere fast. I think it could be months before he stops crawling most of the time. When he does walk a couple of metres, it's slow & cautious with his hands out as if he's walking on the deck of a ship in high seas.

This past week saw his first sentence: baow tuck! (bear stuck) Tuck is a common word around here, as it seems he's always getting things stuck--his walker gets hung up on furniture, he shoves his hand into things... We're definitely at the 'word spurt' stage: he's picking up 5-10 words a day now, which is getting harder & harder to track here on the blog.

Sprout seems to have had a realization this week that he can use language for many communicative purposes, rather than just naming things. He's answering yes/no questions with yeah or no & giving us confirmation that we've understood him, like when he says baba & we get his straw cup, he says yeah, yeah!


Another cool thing I've noticed lately is that he's starting to fill in parts of the story in his favourite books when we read them. He loves Meg & Mog & although we haven't read it in a while, when Papa opened it up to the page with the explosion, Sprout said, "Boom!". Then later when I was reading him another favourite he insisted on, Guess How Much I Love You, he filled in the last word of the story. "I love you all the way to the moon, and...", before I could finish my sentence, he said, "Back!"


Sadly, he & I have already picked up our first illness of the year, no doubt from one of the kids at the community centre open gym. Luckily it's not too bad, just a minor cold & we'll both be over it by the next update.

Some good news on the health front: Sprout seems to have outgrown his sensitivity to acidic foods. I think it was about ten months ago that we realized he was getting a bad sunburn-like bum rash after eating blueberries, kiwis or tomatoes. I know a few other kids who've had this problem, & was hoping his little digestive system would eventually be able to handle acidic stuff before he was out of diapers. So we would give him a bit of tomato or kiwi every month or so to test it & a few weeks ago he had no reaction. He's been eating kiwis & having tomato sauce on pasta & pizza for at least a couple of weeks now. At this point, the only things we have to worry about feeding him are choking hazards like whole grapes, or small, hard foods like nuts & candies.

His favourite toys this week are sticks of various sorts: the broom, the Swiffer (took a couple of sections of the handle out to make it toddler sized--we don't use it anymore), a part from his playpen toy arch, the car windshield scraper. He's too young for role playing like sword or gunplay with them, thankfully, but he really does like carting sticks around the house. It's part of a larger trend of mimicking us: he copies what we say all the time & he also likes to copy our actions. If I'm wiping the table or the window, he wants a cloth so he can do it too. If I feed him something, he wants to hand me a mouthful too.

Here's a video of Sprout playing, talking about his rocking moose, then showing off not so much his walking skills, but a basketball-style pivot.