My funny boy

Kai continues to amaze me. I know Anya seemed to be learning by leaps and bounds at this age, but her goal was independence; she wanted to learn to walk, run, and climb, because she wanted to do things for herself.

Kai is different. Kai wants to get around so he can follow me. He does this cute penguin belly flop sort of crawl, and can get around amazingly fast that way. But rather than get into stuff, as his sister tended (okay, tends) to do, he's trying to keep up with me.

He also tries harder to communicate. Whereas Anya worked harder to entertain everyone, Kai tries to talk; he looks at me very intently and babbles. Also, he has learned that certain actions on his part, like lifting his arms and grunting, elicit a certain response from me, and he uses them to get me to do what he wants. Anya's focus was (and is) autonomy; Kai's is connection.

But the thing that really blows me away is that Saturday night, he told his first joke.

A little setup. R had to get up at 4:30, so he went to bed early. Anya also fell asleep pretty early. Kai was not tired; he wanted to play. (This is, I should add, extremely unusual for him. Anya is the night owl, not Kai.) I was trying to nurse him to sleep when he discovered that rolling his ear across the spot where he'd drooled on my arm made a clicking sound. He did this over and over, and just giggled. Stinkin' cute, but I was afraid it was going to keep R awake. So I took Kai in the living room.

That, as it turns out, was exactly what he wanted.

Finally has Mom all to himself.

To prove to me that spit is funny, he sang me a little song. Then he did this:

I could tell he was reminding me how funny it was when he was making that clicking noise. The fact that half an hour or so had elapsed made it our little inside joke. "Hey, Mom, remember that time when I did that thing and it was so funny?"

My baby told a joke. How adorable is that?