My son turned 18 months old three days ago. It’s a bit…strange to think that he’s halfway to being three already. While it doesn’t seem like yesterday that he was being pulled out into the world, it doesn’t seem like it was that long ago either.

Mum and I went out to eat with him on Friday while my husband was on duty. He was impressing the people at Applebee’s because of his cute laugh and inquisitive spirit. He kept having conversations with the people at the table behind us and offering them bits of his chicken sandwich.

I think by far his favorite part of the evening was when he got to have some of the lava cake that Mum and I were sharing. See?

He’s come a long way in the past month to actually holding conversation. He has so many words but hasn’t quite worked out how all of them are used. This morning when I put him in his umbrella stroller so we could go and take the rent check down he told me, “Blah-burble-blah, face, cat, wow, cool, plurpa, boo, wow.” Not quite sure what it all means. He’s definitely grasped the word, “No,” which is proving unfortunate. The other day when I took some letters away from him that he had knocked down off the counter to shred he ran after me yelling, “No! No! Ma, no!”

He’s fathoming out how things function too. He can do up and undo the restraints on his high chair and his umbrella stroller, but thankfully, only when he’s in them. He understands about putting shoes on but doesn’t quite know about the whole “tongue of the shoe” issue so keeps trying to put his foot between the shoe and the tongue instead of in the shoe under the tongue. Yesterday he was showing me that he knows how the wind up toys are supposed to work but he doesn’t have enough patience to wind them up properly. He also knows about buttons on things, which means he wants to push them all the time, so he’ll turn the TV on and off, or the camera, or open and close the CD tray on the computer. He knows CDs go in that too, and will open the CD cases and try to stack them in four at a time…I can see us installing a cabinet door on the desk rather than just disabling the start button.