I can eat with a spoon all by myself...

I love that my little boy is so generous with himself and his things ~ saying 'Hi' to everone he meets, giving random people and kids his toys, trying to feed me his food.

He copies so many words now, and jumbled 3 and 4 word sentences, where one can only make out one real word, and the sounds of the rest of the sentence.  Last week I gave him a dragon toy, and was surprised when he said 'Dragon' almost perfectly straight away.  This was the start of it, and its become super-chronic since.  Today we played a counting game on Sesame Street on the computer, and he attempted every number ~ getting at least half of them right, and some of the sounds in the others.  He is rather obsessed by the number 8 at the moment, which has eclipsed his love of the number 3.  At least he can say, 'eight' ~ he still says 'ghee' for 3.

The alphabet song.  His alphabet song craziness has died down ~ there was a time a couple of months ago when he sang it almost constantly for 3 weeks.  When I sang 'Twinkle Twinkle Little Star' to him, he was mesmerised, as it is the same tune.  He sings quite well, and the tune is obvious to those who hear it.  He'll hardly sing the alphabet song now, though, even if prompted ~ other interests have taken over.  Blake's memory for tunes is amazing.  I sang 'Hot Cross Buns' to him once when he was 10mo, and this easter, at 20mo, I gave him a bun, and he started humming the tune after not hearing it that whole time.

His fascination with clocks still persists...his grandfather, who we are staying with, barely gets a look in if he is wearing his watch.  Blake will come through the door after a walk and check Rob's wrist for his watch, not even saying hello.  Blake will, though, greet nearly everyone else with a 'Hi' or 'Hello'!

This boy has been known to think about clocks in his sleep.  At the start of his clock obsession, a few months ago, I remember him sitting bolt upright from a deep sleep, pointing to the bedroom clock, exclaiming 'clock!' twice, and falling back to sleep ~ talk about obsessed!  He has also said 'car-car' in his half sleep many a time....I wonder what he's dreaming about...or if he is dreaming, or just saying his favourite word.  I shall have to search for signs of REM sleep next time, if I am in the room.

He has been intrigued with the concept of, and imitating, sleep of late.  Last week he took to making incursions into his grandparents' bedroom, laying on their bed, and making a fake snoring noise with a big smile on his face ~ 'aaawk-pshhooo, aawk, pshooooo!'  He also goes to the dogs' beds and pretends to be a sleeping dog.  I remember him copying the dogs at 9mo, crawling with a toy in his mouth after seeing the pup carrying a stick.  He was chuffed with his handy discovery of a way to carry things when crawling, without having to encumber his hands!

Blake and Snicket

It is very hard to induce Blakey to draw ~ he is so interested in how the tops go on the textas, how the pen clicks on and off, and how great the crayons are to chew (or how many he can hold at once in his hands); he finds the idea of making marks on the page with anything to be extremely boring by comparison.  Here is some typical toddler art ~ from a few months ago when he was actually into drawing for about 5 minutes...

He came out with his first spontaneous 2-word sentence today: 'Hello, guy' to a fellow walker in the park.  Not mimicked, just off the top of his head...he is 20.5mo corrected for prematurity.  He has now learnt all his basic colours (though sometimes mixes up orange and yellow), recognises the numbers 1-9, can point out at least 40 different animals, make the noises of 2 dozen of them, and usually identify the basic shapes.  He also knows all his positional words ~ over, under, beside, through, etc.  I am very pleased with his progress.  For a late starter (and a boy, at that!), he's doing a great job.