Dear Dinky

I'll regret not noting down all the funny and amazing things that you have done in the past few months. You are now sixteen months old.

You have started to speak, though we don't always understand. I used to count the words in your vocabulary, but she stopped counting a couple of months ago, after you started to be a parrot and learn a new word or two every hour.

I had never noticed until you started talking, but you seem to be a very smart baby. You have figured out how to get our attention and to get your way, and slow Amma is just starting to catch on.

You love Akka and are happy to see her, play, sing duets, and dance with her, but you're also starting to fight. Today I saw you grab a toy from her hands before yelling "Please?". She also takes interesting things right out of your hands , so I suppose you're even.

I'll try to keep up better writing down the things that you do.

Dreams

Pranav loves to learn and use words. He seemed to be progressing normally until he was one. Then in a couple of months, he seemed to have skipped a year and acts more like a two year old in many ways.

I used to proudly count the number of words he said, but stopped counting after it crossed a hundred, and he seemed to be learning a few new words each day. Because he says so much, I know what he wants, and what he is thinking, much of the time, much more than I did when Summy was a baby. The most amazing thing to me, though, is how he dreams.

I read that babies start dreaming at a year of age. He cries in his sleep sometimes, and I guessed he was dreaming too. But one day, he started to talk clearly in his sleep, and suddenly we not only knew that our one year old was dreaming, but also what he was dreaming about!

For example, one night he cried, "Akka! Tone!". He must have been dreaming that Summy, his Akka, took away his favorite toy, my iPhone. Sometimes he giggles out her name, sometimes he cries, but "Akka" is a recurring theme in his dreams.