Starting to see the benefits of communication

You used to be able to point at a picture of a ball and get Finn to say "bah." For months he's shown zero interest in that. Then this morning as I was sitting on the other side of the room stuffing diapers, he got out a book, opened it up, pointed to a dog, and said "dah!" then pointed to a ball and said "bah!" Then he was done. Okay!He'll also repeat "hot-ah" after you whenever you tell him something's hot. This morning I told him my cream of wheat was hot when it came out of the microwave, and then when I brought the bowl out to the living room 15 mintues later, he pointed at it: "hot-ah!" I told him it was okay now, and gave him a bite (too bland; no second bite requested). The other night he warned me that the bread machine might be "hot-ah" when I was making pizza dough - apparently Jonathan had told him it was hot the last time he used it. Pretty cute! We'll try to get some video this weekend, but we never know when he's going to pipe up, and when he's just going to smile and pretend he doesn't know what we're talking about.

My favorite thing is that he's more likely to try to tell us what's wrong instead of just melting down. Tuesday he was freaking out in his room and I said "What?!" then stopped, breathed, and restated "Tell Mama what's wrong. Show Mama what you want." He stopped, sighed, considered; took a step, then raised his arms for me to pick him up, and proceeded to direct me around the house. Eventually we got to the kitchen and got him a piece of bread, but I'm not sure that was his original goal. He just seemed to like that he could tell me what to do.

Speaking of which, our couch is now at his mercy. One morning I discovered he could climb on it himself if I took one of the cushions off and put it on the floor, and now it's like that 80% of the time he's awake. It's his indoor bouncy jungle gym. We get very imperious looks if he grabs at the cushion and we don't back him up with our super grownup strength.