It speaks!

Alexander has started talking. Kind of. He's started pointing at things and uttering monosyllabic nouns (not just any nouns though; roughly appropriate ones). That he thinks all birds are ducks and all vehicles are cars is demonstrative of his impressive pattern-recognition skills. After all, imagine how well developed you'd have to be before you could explain the qualities that cars and other vehicles have in common. I mean all road vehicles have wheels, but not all wheeled things are road vehicles. And they all travel on the road but so do bicycles. It is really very clever to recognise the connection, I think.

He has also taken to declaring "Done!" after each meal. Being so well brung-up, this horrified me. "You mean, he can't manage a thank you?"

In the picture he is wearing a jacket I made him in the autumn. This was an incredible feat on account of the fact that I had no pattern, no experience of making such a garment, but most crucially, I hadn't taken a single measurement of the child and just had to guess how big he was. This was a very foolish way to go about things, but I was fiddling with it when I was rather ill and by some miracle it worked.

Unfortunately, he is sporting a somewhat "Auntie made me wear it" expression in the photo...