Simon's Latest & Greatest

As he approaches 1.5 years old, Simon is losing the last bits of babyishness he had, and trading them in for all-out toddlerness. Physically he has started thinning out, looking less like an infant and more like a little boy. He's also more and more adventurous. Though I wouldn't quite call it a "run" yet, he often seems to think that walking is too slow to accomplish his various tasks, so he breaks out into a toddling-run that's pretty adorable:



He's also talking up a storm. When he was about 16 months old we sat down to make a list of his words--some of which sound nothing like "our" words, as he created some himself. At that time we came up with about 30 words he uses on a fairly frequent basis, and I'm sure the list has grown in the past month. Here, he was bringing library books into the living room one-by-one, from his bedroom. I don't remember what I was trying to catch on camera, but I ended up getting something even better--I call it Simon's "Ode to Strawberries".



In case you couldn't make out exactly what was happening: One of the books is about colors, and has a strawberry on the red page. Simon loves strawberries. So he brings this book in, sits down to look at it, and basically says his word for strawberry over and over and over (something like "wawa")...but given the inflection and emotion, I like to think he was saying more than "strawberry, strawberry, strawberry"...maybe something like "Oh strawberry, you are so yummy! Oh strawberry, I like to eat you! Oh strawberry, so red and juicy!..."