Three, sir.

(Remember this sweater I made, way back before Ian was even born?  It finally fits him!)

Ian is 19 months old now (in fact, today is his 19 monthiversary!) and he is just exploding with words.  He talks ALL the time -- a lot is still just gibberish, even to us, but his list of understandable words has grown to the point where it would take me quite a while to come up with anything resembling a complete list.  (And of course, being the stellar mother I am, I haven't been jotting down his new words as he learns them.  Someday, he'll ask when he learned certain things, and I'll just have to admit that I'm not as awesome at record-keeping as a librarian really ought to be.)

What's really neat to watch is that he's beginning to be able to express concepts, not just nouns.  He LOVES to go outside, and he will now go stand by the door and yell "Outside! Outside!" while trying to work the doorknob.  And he knows the whole routine that goes along with that too -- before going outside he'll retrieve (well, try to retrieve -- he can't quite reach) his jacket from the coat hook ("acket! acket!") and then wander around the house muttering "shooooes, shoooooes" until he finds his shoes.  And his tocks, of course.  You can't put on your shoes until you have your tocks on. 

He loves his books, too, and has started to have very definite preferences for what you read him, and when.  We used to be able to read him pretty much anything at bedtime, but now we have a selection of five or six books (mostly by Sandra Boynton) that he finds acceptable.  (Thankfully, other books are acceptable at other times.)  His favorites are The Going to Bed Book, Perfect Piggies, Oh My Oh My Oh Dinosaurs (which he very cutely calls "My My") and, of course, the perennial childhood favorite Goodnight Moon (he likes to point out the kitties on all the pages on which they appear).  He's started to memorize some of the books, too -- in The Going to Bed Book there's a section "And when the moon is on the rise, they all go up to exercise" and he will often yell EXERCISE! (or something closely resembling it, anyway) at the right time. 

What's really hilarious, though, is his counting.  He's starting to learn his numbers.  I'm not sure how much of it is an actual understanding of the concept of numbers -- I think at this point, he's still mostly just repeating what he hears us say -- but he can count to five relatively reliably.  If you start counting and then stop, he will say the next number in the sequence, usually very loudly and with great enthusiasm.  My favorite is FWREEEEEE!  But if left to his own devices, he counts "doo, doo, FIIIIVE!"  Which makes me giggle every time.  So young, and already making Monty Python references.  That's my boy!

Comments

[Katie]

This is such an awesome age, developmentally! Seeing the memory build to full blown retention is so cool. And I am so happy you mentioned the conceptual learning; that's one of my favorites to watch too. :-)

[kim]

The kid is awesome. No surprise, really --- all in the genetics.