It has been a while since I posted a status update on our little brat Eric.

The boy has made some neat progress in the last four months. He’s just passed 16 in total. He has become able to do these things, though by no means consistently:

• sleep regularly through the night
• eat good food, feeding himself
• recognize letters of the alphabet by sound or by picture
• recognize digits
• recognize basic shapes, colours
• recognize a few written words
• recognize a boatload of spoken words
• say truncated forms of many words (one vowel + one consonant)
• count objects up to four
• giggle voraciously
• drawing horizontal and vertical lines
• bang on the synthesizer keyboard, yelling and wiggling (“Sing, Eric! Dance, Eric!”)
• invent little game 1: hiding things, feigning surprise at their disappearance, then finding it again, victoriously
• invent little game 2: sneaking around to my back, tickling me, cracking up if unable to get around me unnoticed: all this is payback for what I routinely do to him

• invent little game 3: sneaking over to this very computer (elastic.org), moving his fingers near the reset button, grinning with tongue-in-cheek, and saying “no no no no”, just taunting me

His first year was hell itself, but now he’s become a more entertaining than hassleicious. Brat.