At almost a year and a half old, the Sprout still isn’t quite ready for Christmas. Travel and colds upset his schedule so much that he didn’t open his presents until one o’clock in the afternoon, and he was still more interested in our drink glasses than he was in the toys he got. His newest trick is learning to drink out of a glass, you see.

We’re giving him cups of water because he’s still surprised and puzzled that he ends up wet when he upends the cup over his head.

That’s not his only trick, though. Although he mostly communicates using the Screech, Point, and Stomp method, he’s showing a lot of signs of abstract thinking. At my parents’ house he took my keys out of my hand and marched to the other side of the house to the back door. You pick up the keys, then you go to the door.

On Wednesday he pointed to my mother’s glass and said “milk cup,” which was imprecise but broadly correct. Friday before he left he pointed to it and said “Coke,” which was much more accurate.

He also seems to recognize the area immediately surrounding home. When we turned off the Interstate into Christiansburg he started chanting “I do! I do! I do!” which is pretty much what he says when he’s excited about doing something.  (Sometimes he is more precise: “I do button.”) But he said this non-stop for several miles until we took the turn into our neighborhood. Then it became “Meeem meeem meeem meeem,” which means “I see (or am thinking about) a cat.”

This morning he saw a cat and just said “mew.”

The grandparents gave him a “Muppet Babies” book. The Sprout’s favorite movie is The Muppet Movie and his favorite Muppet is Animal. He actually learned to growl from Animal. When Elf reached a page in the Muppet Babies book with a baby Animal, he touched the picture of Animal and growled.

So. The abstraction engine is working in that little Sprout brain.

When we were childless people used to tell us all the great things about kids we took to be homilies. One of those things was “kids keep you young.” This is not merely a homily, it is true. While driving through Marion yesterday we were interrupted by a train signal. My first thought was to try to race the light, but I’ve done too much work with Operation Lifesaver to shake hands with that particular danger. My second thought was that the Sprout was going to get to see a train up close.

“Look! A train! A train is coming!” The Sprout loves toy trains. Not sure he’s abstracted that to the real thing yet.

Anyway, the point is that instead of being annoyed at waiting for the train to go by, I actually enjoyed it, seeing the train through my son’s eyes.