He's becoming more of a person every day which is at the same time delightful and disconcerting. He now knows the difference between Shelbi, myself and the dog, preferring the dog to both of us. Although he still isn't putting many words together he is getting better at communicating with us and, perhaps most frighteningly, he has learned the Law of Conservation of Matter. Perhaps he has not fully researched the entirety of Mikhail Lomonosov's 18th century theory but he certainly gets the broad strokes. Namely that matter can not be created or destroyed.

In layman's terms, he knows that if we take something away from him, it doesn't simply disappear. The area behind our backs is not a black hole and, once something has been taken from him, we have to put it down sometime. This reared its head on a few occasions this week. First, Shelbi's brush was taken away from him and placed a good two feet out of his reach on an end table. After the obligatory freak out, I was able to distract Elliott with something slightly less choke-inducing albeit considerably less fun. A few minutes later I left the room for literally 20 seconds to refresh my e-mail, came back and when I did the mail (which was also on the end table) was on the floor and Elliott was happily gnawing on the brush again. I still have no idea how he accomplished this without tipping entire table over.

Not long afterwards, I made the mistake of leaving Elliott's Gerber Wagon Wheel container within his line of vision. I promptly swooped it up but it was too late. He had made a beeline for it and wasn't going to be denied. He screamed when I took it out of reach and followed me as I put it up on the kitchen table, out of sight. And yet not out of mind. He just stared up at me by the table whimpering with a face I'm sure he learned from watching our dog and began making the sign for "More" which he recently learned. And if you think there was even a fraction of a chance that I could resist that, you're out of your mind.