Shannon Phillips

Robin’s once again crossed one of those invisible thresholds of growth: lately both Sam and I are prone to look at him, look again, and exclaim “When did he get so big?” He can climb in and out of the bathtub now on his own, although generally he’s wise enough to wait until one of us comes over to give him a hand. He doesn’t fall down so much when he runs: and I love to watch him run, I love the way he throws himself heedlessly forward and just barely manages to catch himself with every step. It’s a full-body expression of the enthusiasm with which he approaches the world.

He’s talking more too. This morning Marlis walked over him in the bed and he said “Uh-oh! Why why why meow?” Translation: “What’s that cat doing and why did she step on me?” (He can say “kitty” and “doggie,” but he prefers to refer to a cat as a meow and a dog as a woof-woof, I think because there’s less confusion between the words.) Anyway, so he’s now using three-word sentences, and it’s even possible to have extended conversations with him on a subject, although these conversations tend to veer randomly into left field. He’s also still very likely to form a sentence with a recognizable English word at the beginning and at the end, but a stream of baby babble in the middle. I wonder if that’s what we sound like to him?

He’s developed an interest in letters, fueled, I think, by his ClickStart games. When we’re walking around he’ll often stop to point at signs in shop windows, picking out the various letters: he does the same thing when Sam wears a tee-shirt with writing. Though he often gets confused between Y and V, or C and J, he’s pretty reliable about identifying most of them. If you ask him to find a letter on a keyboard, he’ll press the right one about 75% of the time. I’ve been impressed enough by this development to let him play the ClickStart more often: he loves it intensely and he’s clearly learning from it, and it gives me time in the mornings to drink coffee and update my blog.

The head-banging behavior that vexed us so much has dropped away almost entirely, discarded at pretty much the instant he figured out that throwing his sippy cup on the floor provokes a better reaction from us. (We have to clean up whatever liquid dribbles from its top, so we really don’t like this behavior—but there’s definitely some part of me that notes and approves of his increasingly sophisticated efforts to communicate frustration and anger.) Now if we do something that pisses him off, like picking up his toys, he’s very likely to run into the kitchen to grab his sippy cup just so that he can come back and throw it on the floor in front of us. This is annoying, but also hilarious.

His great pet peeve—people who say the same thing at the same time—remains in place, but he’s grown a bit more tolerant of accidental lapses. I’m even allowed to sing along to the music sometimes. (Sometimes not.)

He has a well-developed sense of the things that are his, and no sense at all of the things that belong to other people. For instance he’ll eat off our plates liberally, but he will scream and yell if I take anything from his plate, even if it’s a portion of food that’s gone untouched for hours. Similarly he’ll often grab books that we’re reading, but try and take anything in his grasp and he’ll respond with an immediate and full-throated howl.

I should say, though, that with other kids he’s a bit more well-mannered. He’ll often run up to kids in the park that have interesting toys, and try to reach for them: not violently, thank goodness—just tentatively and with a smile, in a kind of ‘oh that’s cool, can I see it?’ way. When other kids pick up his stuff he doesn’t usually get mad, but follows them around and watches carefully.

He’s getting better at initiating games with the other kids—mostly he just runs up to them and smiles, or offers them his ball, and often a kind of impromptu game of tag will result. The rules of Toddler Tag are a bit incoherent, but the main points are that all players assume that all other players are It, and mommies are always considered safe. Each player wants to be chased, so will try and get as close as possible to another player in order to catch their attention: of course, this is often perceived as chasing behavior, provoking the other toddler to run, shrieking with laughter, to their mommy. The game usually ends when the players get distracted and wander off.

I’ll try and take another picture of Robin soon. All that’s on my camera right now is this cityscape I snapped over the weekend: