It feels like forever since I’ve had an update on Oliver, but it looks like it’s only been a month and half. Still, at this point a month and a half is still a significant portion of his life, so I guess it is a long time in baby terms!

He says so many words now we stopped counting them. He’s starting to put two words together more and more, although I can’t help but notice they’re usually in conjunction with food. His two most common two word sentences are “more X” and “X please”, where X is the name of a food item. He still resorts to a lot of pointing at something and saying please, which is not as good as using two words, but good enough in that it’s too adorable to ignore, so he gets what he’s pointing at.

He’s also referring to himself as “Ollie” sometimes, generally in conjunction to food (are you noticing a theme here?) If you’re eating something or even holding food or putting it on the table, he points to it and says, “Ollie! Ollie!” He’s just learned the word “me” in the past 24 hours or so, and understands that when he says it, it refers to himself. Hopefully that doesn’t replace “Ollie”, because hearing him say Ollie is so dang cute.

All of this control means he is being a little bit more selective in his food. Now that he knows he has some choice in the matter, he will pick some foods over others. Some days he won’t eat something that he ate perfectly well a different day. However, he still likes pretty much everything under the sun, so this hasn’t been too much of an issue. We are getting into spots where we have to hide something, especially cheese, because if he sees it, he won’t eat anything else.

The sleeping is still going okay. He still goes to sleep by himself and more or less sleeps through the night okay. He usually wakes up between 2 and 4 times a night, but you just have to say, “Oliver, go to sleep! It’s not time to get up yet!” and he goes right back to sleep, no problem. So, while this is a little annoying sometimes, it’s not really a problem, and certainly light years better than where we were! So I’m not complaining about this.

The big development is his love for going pee pee and poo poo in the potty. He loves it! We just offer it to him every once in awhile, and he’s going a couple of times a day, every day. Sometimes he even points to his bottom and says, “Poo poo!” and we put him on the potty and he goes! Or, if we set him on the potty, he usually strains and strains trying to get something out (pee pee is apparently as hard to get out as poo poo). So he obviously understands what he’s there to do, though he doesn’t see the point of *not* going in his diaper if he has to go. He’s a little young for potty training, but I have to think that the more times he goes in the potty, the easier it’s going to be when the time comes. The best rewards for a successfully potty break are 1) saying, “bye bye poo poo!” when he flushes, and 2) being able to use the toilet paper. Ooh man, he loves that one.

As Sara said the other day, “I think he’s even starting to have a neck!” What more could you ask for out of life than to have a neck?