Circle and rings

I remember Marcus stacking the rings when he was 11 month old. I gave him the stacking toy when he was 9 mth old, and Marcus played with it for a while. Nicholas was given the same toy at his 10th mth and a month later, he could stack too. I only showed him a few times, but he seemed to figure it out.

During our playing last week, I placed a shape sorter in front of Nicholas and he kept picking out the "cylinder" amongst the 15 other shapes and adjusted his grip on it till he could fit it into the "circle" shape of shape sorter. After his first two successes, I was impressed and wondered if it was just luck. So I asked him to give me the "circle" shape and he chose the cylinder repeatedly to give to me. I did the same with "triangle" and he got it right too, though it was harder to fit into the sorter. Whenever he couldn't do it, he would scream "ahhh" after a few tries and throw the shape away. Haha!

Perhaps the little baby did learn a lot just by watching Marcus play. He even tried to arrange the cars in lines like Marcus and is already doing some pretend play!! Last week, he pretended to feed me and E some food with the toy spoon and he has been pretending to cook for a long time. He saw Marcus pouring all the tiny Lego pieces from the mosaic set into the pot to cook, and the baby wanted the same. When we didn't allow, he would throw whatever he could get hold of - a car or any toy - and start stirring with the spoon or ladle.

He pointed at a bird yesterday and uttered "bird" (sounded more like "ber"). That was one of Marcus' first words too. The similiarities are striking but the differences are emerging too.... what an exciting phase!