Month 27 - "Hamish doit!"
November has been a month mostly about language. Some of it has been commendable, such as when Hamish is being polite while playing with his toys. Its pretty cute to hear him off a drink to a car, and then have the car reply with "yes please". He also appears to have graduated from blackmail (with goldengrove's glasses last month) to shmoozing as a way of getting what he wants. On top of batting his eyelids when he says "pleeese?", totally out of the blue he said "Mummy pretty eyes" to goldengrove. Suave bugger, isn't he? I can only assume its the beginning of an intricate campaign to get biscuits whenever he wants them.
Some of the new bits of language have been less ideal. At some point he's learnt that its fun to scream a single word as loud as possible. You'll be sitting quietly in the house and suddenly "BISCUITS!" is squealed out from behind you. Or "BOTTLE!". Its not that he's demanding these things, its just that he finds it hilarious to be that excited about whatever it is. Sometimes its not even that coherent - he's been to the pool and the beach a few times in the last month and the first five minutes is taken up by excited squealing and laughing. Its almost like there's some sort of inherited or environmental influence that might encourage him to loudness.
On the far end of the spectrum, when things go wrong you can often hear "rats! poot! ratspoot! ratspootbum!" being yelled from one end of the house to the other. As swearing goes, its pretty mild - especially when recently the parrot has picked up a couple of slips from both of us, and from random passersby. We have mostly gotten past it by pretending we misheard him and powered on - "oh, you're going to sit?" or "yes, that is a fire truck on your bottle".
Physically, he has had a bit of a growth spurt, and is increasingly less spaz when it comes to complicated activities like "catching", "running", "using the television remotes" and "walking across a flat surface without falling over". There's a bunch of hand-eye coordination games he has that are becoming easier, and he grasps that sometimes he needs to slightly rotate toys when they won't click together properly (with the exception of curved wooden railway pieces, which for some reason he just can't seem to grasp the right orientation of). The tallness also translates into being able to get into the pantry and get things off shelves, and being able to reach the front door latch (fortunately he can't turn it. Yet). A friend that hadn't seen him for a bit commented that we suddenly have a little boy rather than a toddler, and I think that's true.
Outings include heading to Jells a couple of times, down to Sandringham beach with tacomonkey for a swim and a lot of digging, visting my cousin Tracey and family, hanging out with anthonybaxter at his 40th in Prahran, visiting Aunt Gayle and cousin Natalie, going to the local pools a couple of times, geekweevil visiting for dinner, going to pink_kan's baby warming, staying with grandma when our house was being rewired, having Gab, Michael and Kara visit and the arrival of Hamish's latest second cousin, Franklin (not really an outing I guess), bringing his great grandmother's count up to 32 great grandkids.
Not only this month, but a year's worth of phone photos from goldengrove's phone.