15 months and 10 days

He has learnt quite a few tricks in the recent days. Most significantly, he has started to say a couple of words, one of which is only really an exclamation - "Uh-oh-oh!" and the other is "Ta"(Aussie slang for "Thanks"), which they say at the childcare when asking him to hand over something. He now says "Ta" when he is trying to hand over to us the myriad of objects lying on the floor which we don't really want picked up. He also says it when he is asking us to give him something. He couples this with a new way of pointing to things: he points with his index finger by stretching his arm out and moving his wrist up and down as if to stress the point. He probably picked up the "Uh-oh-oh!" from the childcare because we don't say it all that often at home. He says it with a raising and falling inflection in a sing-song fashion when he sees a spill or an object falling to the ground.

Another tooth has popped out on his lower right jaw bringing the current count to seven.

He is very fond of coins possibly because we don't allow him to play with them. He now knows that the first drawer of the buffet in the living room has a stash of coins and points to it when that drawer is opened.

He sings songs of his own tune when he is travelling in the car or when he is on a full stomach and playing by himself.

He has learnt to tickle us under the neck because I do that to him, except, his tickling borders more on poking and pinching while laughing himself. We are meant to be amused and laugh at his actions, apparently. He is very ticklish himself and one funny way is with his warm bottle in my hand touching his stomach when I pick him up with the same hand I have the bottle in. He is very amused by that.

Reading books to him is a bit of a challenge, especially as he always tries to close them. I am not sure if he finds the cover page more attractive than the contents or if he is trying to tell me something not very subtly. He does respond to one his board books, though. It is basically a picture book and he points to a different location in the house or his body part for each object in there. For shoes and socks it is his feet, for hats and caps it is his head, for bananas and apples it is the fruit bowl in the kitchen, for cars it is the kitchen window along with a kiss and wave. I was pleasantly surprised when he did this the first time as I kept turning the pages because I only used to point to the picture and name it and never actually taught him to point to the locations. That he figured out on his own.

The two of us went to a mum's group meet on Friday after a very long time. We had Cris cringe and he got a cute ceramic brightly painted bowl with a matching mug and an egg cup from Suellen. There was also a soap in the shape of a cow. I told her it is too cute to ever get used, the soap, I mean. The bowl was used the same afternoon.

Breakfast in the morning today was an unpleasant affair. He went through half of his porridge(it's all he eats for breakky these days) and then wasn't interested any more. Here I was waiting for him to finish so we can get dressed and leave and he was pointing to go upstairs. I thought the traffic from the retreat window might distract him and help with the eating but that wasn't happening either. He kept dancing around the table and knocked over the bowl of porridge in the end. Fuming, I I went into the bathroom to wash up and I hear from behind me a soft and clear "Uh-oh!"