My boy is 20 months old and we still have not enrolled him in for nursery school. Not that it’s a bad thing, but we somehow feel that he is still not quite ready given his still-limited vocabulary.

Or perhaps, one can argue that it is just us who are not quite ready to send our little baby off to school, and then wondering what do we do with our Nanny.

But that is beside the point.

So Squirt is just 4 months short of turning two, and despite his limited vocab, he has shown some understanding to many more words than what he is able to say. There have been times when I ask him to grab something from the room or put his sippy cup in the kitchen, and he has responded pretty well by trotting over to the said place and returned with exactly what I asked for or what I requested for him to do, along with a huge smile on his face!

He has a few favourite words , one being the over-used “NO”  followed by “MINE”, “I want theeese”, “I want water” (even if he meant to ask for milk), “shuoooos” (shoes) , “uppabaf” (up above in the tune of twinkle twinkle little star), “cawwy” (carry) and the recent  obsession with “mi-mi-mi-mi-mi-mi-moeeeee…” (eenie meeny miney moe) amongst other things.

This boy is a riot, I’m telling you. He is easily the friendliest kid on the block, he is quite happy to be left alone to play and explore on his own when we go on any playdate and usually, he is wired with more than enough megawatt smile to light up the entire room on any given day. He has also recently discovered that walking on the tip of his toes seems to be like the fun-nest thing to do every once in a while.

Squirt still sucks his thumbs – usually when he is tired, hungry, about to go to sleep or sometimes when he is just day-dreaming at the back-seat of the car. Both his thumbs have been quite sore with hard corns forming on them.  I have seen fresh blisters and putting an anti-thumb sucking substance didn’t work on him as he sucks right through them! These days, whenever I catch him with his thumb in his mouth, he would usually put his thumb out almost immediately when I say, “Finger ooout…”

He would listen and his reaction is classic.

He would look at me intently, slooowly pulls his thumb out of his mouth (sometimes you can hear a little pop as he pulls it out), pucker up his lips as he sucked in his cheeks and then looking completely hilarious as he does all of that in slow motion –  but only for  to put in back again 3 minutes later. (of which I would keep repeating myself again and again and then trying to  get his hands busy with something else).

Squirt, surprisingly is quite the sleeper. He has gotten back to napping 2x a day and when he is asleep at night, he is usually quite dead to the world. He usually seems to be in such deep sleep that he doesn’t even flinch when we turn the night light on to change his nappy,  moved him about as we strip him off, clean him up, changed his diaper and then put his pants back on. Every once in a while, we notice that he would instinctively lift his legs for us, one after another,  as we try to slip each leg into his pants after changing his nappy. But that really is about it. Otherwise, Squirt has been quite a sound sleeper at night and does not wake up easily. Best of all, he usually wakes up so happy that it is such a joy to see a smiling baby (I mean toddler) in the morning.

Recently though, he has been expressing a little defiance by relentlessly hitting me when he doesn’t get his way or throwing things around in frustration when he doesn’t get what he wants. Not really a pleasant sight and given our prior experience with his sister, being firm about not letting him hit and distracting him away from his frustrations seems to be the way to go. It was new side of him which we have not seen before, and this time round, I am certainly handling the temper tantrums much better than I ever had with Spud. That being said, Squirt hardly ever pushes our buttons harder or as much as his sister ever had.

I am being reminded again that we are fast approaching the Terrible Two phase for the second time round. Oh boy.