You really started a learning phase after you turned two years old. Today is your two year and two months -birthday and especially during the past month you've spent all your waking hours wanting to study new things!

Our earlier worry that you might not see all the colors turned out to be false - you now know and recognize all colors and in fact you like to describe objects by their color. "Blue bus", "White socks", "Yellow duck shoes", and so on. You even figured a way to color us too - brown daddy and black mommy (we're guessing it refers to the hair color...)

Your fascination with letters probably started when your mom found a really cool website which has fun Flash animations for each letter. You love this website so much that you often fall asleep checking out the letters still once more at the night time. As a result you now recognize a lot of the letters, though not quite all of them yet.

What has been a little more difficult is the numbers. You love learning the numbers, but they seem somehow harder to grasp than the letters. With a lot of determination though, you know know numbers from 4 to 9 pretty well, but 1, 2 and 3 have caused more trouble. Probably because 1 can be confused to letter I or number 7 depending on how it is written, and 2 is confusingly similar to number 5 and letter S.

In any case, in just few short weeks you've learned to read nearly all Latin alphabets and Arabic numbers, on your own motivation. The Chinese writing system will probably still have to wait a little while...



You now repeat pretty much all words you didn't hear before. Quite amazingly you also remember many of the words after hearing them just once. Just the other day we were doing grocery shopping and I pointed out a pineapple. I'm pretty sure you didn't see a pineapple before, or at least I never told you what it's called. Then, couple days later we saw a picture of pineapple in a book and you confidently called out "Pineapple!"

I think there are no animals left that you don't know, out of those that we have a picture of, or that we can see when going for shopping. You know everything from crocodiles to kangaroos and owls to woodpeckers. Learning about animals even made you briefly forget about cars and you started to play with toy animals. You even picked a soft yellow giraffe as your favorite sleeping toy. But that only lasted for a few days and now you're all about cars again.

And speaking of cars - you have about a million of them. You've learned that they don't appear by magic, we buy them from the toy shop. Your behavior at the toy shop is first class. You go through a lot of cars, compare them and carefully pick just a few that you really want.

When you find something interesting, you bring it to me or your mom and say "Buy it". You don't really argue for it though, so if we don't buy it that's fine too... but you are really picky about what you want. Sometimes you find something that your mom doesn't like (she is another picky person!) and she tries to offer something else - it almost never works. When you decided to like something, there's no changing your mind.



I must say that you are an extremely sensitive person. Not physically so much as mentally. You cry very easily, especially when you're tired. For example if you just got a new car and it's time to go to bed, you absolutely have to sleep holding the car.

And then, the car inevitably falls from your hand at some point. When you wake up in the middle of the night and the car is not in your hand anymore... a loud cry as if something really terrible happened. It'll usually take quite a while to calm you down enough so that you can say between the crying "New car! New car!" This can sometimes be quite annoying, as really there is absolutely nothing to cry about in my opinion...

You are still very lovely boy. You like having mom and dad around and greet us happily when we enter the room, even if we've been out of sight just a moment. You like being wild and running around with me. You've learned the word "careful", but I think you don't really know what it means. I usually tell you to be careful when you do something crazy, so you sometimes run around dangerously yelling "careful!"

You are picking up new words faster than your mom, and in fact you already know more animals or different types of cars than she does! You also handle certain words like excavator or escalator better than she... she can pretty much start asking you if she doesn't know something. I can't wait for you to start learning Chinese, you could probably be a good teacher for me!

The next few weeks will bring the biggest change your world has ever seen - the arrival of a little sister! It'll be exciting to see your reaction. You have recently spent some time playing with the animal toys, and at least with those you show a great deal of caring. We're thinking this may be your way of preparing for the new arrival, on some level that even you probably don't really understand.