It’s been awhile since I’ve sort of talked about what Oliver is up to developmentally these days.

He’s talking a LOT. It appears that the fears of those who thought he might not talk that much because his older sister/chatterbox wouldn’t let him get a word in edgewise are unfounded. He’s up to about five word sentences these days, and they are pretty understandable sentences too. He definitely lets you know what he wants and what he doesn’t want.

He has also discovered the concept of “two” and will often point out when there are two of something, like “Two clocks!” or “Two water bottles!” So far this doesn’t extend beyond two, but if I remember correctly from Evie, it will be awhile yet before he gets more than two. If you say, “I one it,” he will say, “I two it!”, but after that he immediately jumps to, “Ollie ate it!”

He also loves singing, and sings little snatches of songs spontaneously. It’s funny because he usually gets the tune, so you know what he’s singing, but a lot of the words are sort of nonsense approximations of the actual words. You can tell, though, that he’s singing just for the pure joy of singing, which is hard not to find adorable. He does tend to get stuck in infinite loops though, repeating one phrase endlessly, like “Little lamb! Little Lamb! Little Lamb! Little…”

His favorite thing to do is to get the stool out of the bathroom and use that to turn the lights off and on. This is rather unfortunate. I much prefer his second favorite thing to do, which is to work in the play kitchen. He mostly makes coffee and things that are “very hot!”, including oatmeal, which usually turn out to be cups and pots full of necklaces or crayons. He’s very good at entertaining himself, playing at the kitchen or reading books to himself, sometimes for hours.

He’s getting pretty good at climbing stairs, to the point that we’re considering removing the gates in the near future. He likes to have a book in his crib at naptime, though I don’t think he does anything with it, other than just sort of stare at the cover while he’s falling asleep. He likes to “float” in the bathtub and doesn’t mind getting his ears or even really his eyes wet (very different from Evie in this respect!).

Not so much on the potty training. At first, he was going in the potty all the time, and we thought it was going to be so easy. We were soooo smug. Well, he’s all done with that. We’ve been putting him on the potty every night before the bath and other times throughout the day, and he’s gone in there maybe once in the past three months. Furthermore, just getting him to sit on the potty is a big struggle. Total reversal from our early successes. I guess all we can do is keep doing what we’re doing, and hope he changes his mind.

It’s always very interesting to me watching how Evie and Ollie interact with each other. There is so much love between them, it is really amazing. I guess I’m not surprised that he adores her so much and copies her every movement, since he’s the little brother and older kids are just so cool, but I am sort of surprised at how much she really thinks of him. If he’s hurt, she cries. If he cries, she tries to make him feel better. She is always asking him to play with her, and she doesn’t seem to mind at all when he’s following her around, copying her. I assume that will change at some point, but for now it’s very sweet.

Of course nobody can frustrate them like each other either, so you take the good with the bad. They always want whatever the other has, and they can’t help taunting each other with whatever the other wants. Oliver in particular is very protective of whatever he has, getting upset if Evie so much as looks at it. I think this is sort of a survival technique on his part, since her looking at it is often followed by her demanding it, or saying, “I had it first!”

In other words, they are brother and sister.