More W O R D S

Milo truly seems to change every day now. His Aunt Renee saw him yesterday for the first time in about 2 months and it really made us realize how different he is now. You know, when we are the Mommy and the Daddy we see the incremental changes and the transformation is not quite as shocking.

He still loves his letters. It is so funny! I think he loves letters and numbers like other little boys love trucks and cars. He has learned the lower case alphabet now and can count up to 13 so far. We let him take a book into bed each night that he reads by the light his crib-side waterfall (which he still loves) and he always picks one of his alphabet books. I realized yesterday that he picks those because he can read them by himself.

Here are a couple of videos of our little guy demonstrating his skills...





I promise, we are not force feeding him the flashcards. He almost always brings them to us. Of course, he lost interest in performing when we brought out the video camera.

He loves spelling things so we end up spelling out words quite a bit. He has "read" a few words in the last few days. The latest was "baby" which he read for us on his video before the voice said the word. He got "cup" the other day too. Usually he just spells the word and then looks at the picture.

He is talking quite a bit more in general. He uses phrases now like "more grapes" and even told Scratch to "move" yesterday. He picked up "MINE!" at school one day a few weeks ago and continues to use it at the most random times. For instance, last night at the park he had befriended a little girl and they were happily sitting beside each other while Milo was shoveling wood chips into his trick-or-treat pail (he insisted on bringing it...) when all of a sudden he jumped up, ran over a few feet and yelled "MINE!" A few minutes later after I reminded him to play nice, he came back over and was fine. I am pretty sure she had not even touched the pumpkin. Who knows what goes through their heads?

Another big one right now is "mess." He is really good at pointing out messes - especially after he has made them. We tried a bubble bath for the first time last night and he was not a fan. He sat perfectly still with a death grip on the side of the tub and just kept chanting "mess" "mess" "mess." He looked like this about 99% of the time.

I did coax him into one sweet smile. Notice that he is still holding onto the side of the tub though.

Finally, I am not sure what happened but in the last few days he has started saying "Hi!" to everyone we see. At one point this weekend, he was peering out the window at Chick-fil-A calling out "Hi!" to everyone that walked or drove past. Most often, he stands there with his hand upraised in greeting with this look of happy anticipation at the new person coming his way. It makes my heart hurt when people don't return his greeting. It is usually older kids and he is totally oblivious to it now but I know that won't last. Do you think I would get kicked off the playground if I go around grabbing kids by their collar and forcing them to say "hi" back to my child?