One Day, Two Milestones

I went to Patrick's closet (that he shares with Nathan) to find a clean outfit for Nathan to wear today. Of course, he followed me. Just before I closed the closet door, he leaned down and picked up a wooden letter off the floor. It was an extra letter from when I was painting Patrick's and Nathan's names for their rooms that I had stowed in the closet, just in case. I don't even know when it fell to the floor.

Anyway, Patrick saw it and picked it up. I heard him say as he looked at it, "Aaaay," in that cute singsong voice. I turned around with an odd look on my face. "That's right, Patrick. That's an A."

He repeated, "Aaay," again and handed the letter back to me.

Of course I was shocked. To test whether what I'd heard was right, I found the letter C on the top shelf of the closet and handed it to him. He muttered something I couldn't catch and then said, "Seee," followed by more jabbering I couldn't understand.

It appears as though Patrick knows at least some of his letters. I know he'd been paying attention to letters and numbers for a long time, but I had no idea how much he'd been picking up along the way. It seems that all those Sesame Streets I've DVR-ed are paying off!

From this craziness, I went straight to put Nathan in his clean clothes. The outfit I chose for him to wear has buttons up his back, so I rolled him onto his belly to take care of those. It turns out that I had a tough time getting the buttons done, though, because as soon as he was on his belly, he was trying to roll back onto his back. And he did, several times. I ended up having to hold him to get the buttons done.

I'd noticed Nathan was getting much stronger, but I thought it was limited mostly to holding his head up. He'd never shown much interest in rolling over, especially because of how much he loves to be on his belly. I was nearly as shocked to watch him roll himself over repeatedly as I was to hear Patrick identify letters. What a morning!