lurgy

I have a 21-month-old nephew. He lives a hundred-odd miles away, and seems like every time I visit, I come home sick. This time, it's worse than usual - I have lost my voice, which I don't remember ever happening to me before - but I forgive him, because he was pretty miserable with it while I was there.

Also because he is adorable.

I wear glasses, and when I took them off to clean them, he started saying, "oh dear, oh dear," until I put them back on again, and he said, "yeah!"

When he wanted through a door/baby gate (to get to mummy both times, iirc), he came over to where I was sitting, grabbed me round the thumb and towed me over to open it for him. He can close the baby gates, btw, occasionally even getting them to fasten; he will say, "bye-bye," and close the gate behind himself.

When we played the microwave game - setting it to ~20 seconds, counting down to the beep - he clapped and said, "yay!" after it beeped. Actually, he's getting better at the counting down; it used to be pretty random noises, now it's "deh, nigh, eh, dede, dih, fie, foe, ee, ooh, ah, bee-bee! bee-bee!"

He's amazingly confident on the climbing frame - some of the steps are practically waist-high on him, and he's up and down them, no problem. He goes wandering off quite happily: at the playground he was heading for the carpark, in Homebase he was off down the aisles. Also in Homebase, he climbed into one of the display boxes and sat in there, like he was on sale for £16.99.

He'll bring a book over for me to read, and climb up in my lap.

He calls me 'oof'. "Ni' ni', oof."

If you sing him, "uggy uggy oggy," he will sing back, "doo doo dee." (It's the song from Baby Jake - I have seen way too much Cbeebies lately.) And if you sing, "the horn on the bus goes," he replies, "bee-bee-bee, bee-bee-bee, bee-bee-bee," "the horn on the bus goes," "bee-bee-bee, aw day on."

When I said bye-bye at the train station, he started crying. I feel kind of pleased about that, and guilty about being pleased.