22 months

Less than two months before he turns two!

Here are the highlights for his 22-month post, mostly around the increasing dexterity and language fluency.

"Watch me do stuff"

He can string beads! For months, he's been playing with this string and wooden bead toy but he was not able to do it himself. He would try, but then he'd give the string back to me and say "Mommy's turn." I would hold the bead and he would put the string through. However, a couple of days ago, I left him on the floor with this toy, and sure enough, when I looked again, he had three beads strung through. He was ever so proud of himself, too. "Show Daddy," he'd say and walk around the house with his string of beads.

He loves jigsaw puzzles. His Nana gave him a puzzle at Thanksgiving and back then he would just pick up the pieces and twist the hanging bits off. Suddenly this month, he started to want to put the puzzle together and like most tasks involving pattern recognition, he's very good at it.

He's trying to put on his socks and shoes. He can pretty much take off his shoes, hat, gloves, and scarf by himself, but putting them on requires a bit more work. He's close to being able to put on his own shoes (thank goodness for velcro) and while he's an expert at removing socks, he's still working at putting it on.

"Listen to me speak"

Reading lots and lots and lots. He got several books for Christmas and what he likes to do is to sit down with one and have us read to him over and over again (can we say OCD?). He's memorizing it, you see.

The language skills continue to amaze us. He received several books this Christmas and he is especially fascinated by the Dr. Seuss ones from Ninong Richard. He is at this stage where he loves the sound of words so rhyming and saying nonsense words seems to amuse him very much.

He's telling jokes. Ask him about his joke and he will say "eaglePiper," and he'd laugh and laugh. He made up this "joke" one day while looking at his animal book. There was a picture of an eagle, and I guess somewhere nearby, he saw his favourite teddy bear, Piper. He put the two words together and that must have just sounded so hilarious to him. It's very cute. It's like he delivers the punchline without giving us the backstory. Oh, his second joke is "poop, poop, poop." He made that up while we were reading Dr. Suess's ABC book. It goes, "Big P, little p, what begins with P?" I guess he associated poop with "p."