gotta update

It's been so long since a really substantive update that now it feels entirely too huge to even try. So I'm going to just start and babble randomly for a few paragraphs. Apologies in advance for the difficulty in following this post you might have.

The new news first. Tonight I happened to get a glance inside Gavin's mouth and imagine my surprise when I saw not one, but TWO molars on the one side! Then I felt and on the other side was a matching one. Just a week or so ago, I'd checked looking for soft and tender gums and there was nothing. Today, tooth. Here I've been expecting the two year molars to suck as bad as the 12 month molars did and he's gone and pushed two teeth through with hardly a complaint.

Talking. Gavin's doing an awful lot of it these days. He still can't make G, C, K, or T sounds, and has trouble fitting F, S, and SH sounds into words, although he can make the sounds independently of words. But he says heaps and mountains of works with all the other sounds he can make. When he turned 20 months we made a list, which numbered at least 100. I'm pretty sure he's added half over again or more in the past month.

Most of what he says is still single words, although occasionally he puts two together to make a simple sentence. Not in the sense of "I go" or "want cracker", mostly things like "Daddy...hole" which means that Daddy plays golf on the Playstation2. He more tells stories than speaks in sentences. And yes, he calls golf "hole," because of course that's what the ball goes into.

He has gone pee in the potty once more, just day before yesterday. I've decided to pursue his interest in the potty a little more agressively. Not to the point of actually starting potty learning, but I don't want to miss out of helping him toward that. Enough people have told me to jump on this opportunity, so I will.

He's continuing to make huge strides in learning numbers and letters. He can now recognize about half the numbers 0-9 and roughly a third to half the letters, and he can count to 4 as long as we repeat the numbers after him (him: onnne, us: one; him: dooo, us: two; him: deee, us: three; him: dooor, us: four). After four, he loses interest and says "bob!" Of course his recognition isn't perfect, he'll mistake 8 and B, R and A, V and Y, and so on. But on the whole I'd say he's doing remarkably well for only 21 months. And all without us pushing it, too. This is all him showing interest.