Our son was obsessed with trying to get his hands on our cell phones. When he did, he’d hold them up to his ear, chat away and push the buttons just like mom and dad. Trouble was, he actually ends up calling people more often than you’d think. He’s even managed to get 911 on the line.

We tried getting him a toy cell phone with Mickey Mouse on it, but he knows that thing isn’t real. He’ll cast it aside in a second.

So, when my wife and I upgraded our phones, we gave him our old ones. They’re disconnected from service, so he can get all the fun of pressing real buttons on a real phone without the prank calls.

He loves gabbing on it, and will have gibberish conversations with no one in particular. We love it because it encourages his imagination and speech development. He loves it because he gets to act just like mom and dad.

I realized the other day that when I was reading to my son, he’d kind of just sit there and hang out. He wouldn’t really react to what was going on, he was just looking.

Then we got this new book, Bear Snores On, and I started making funny voices for the characters (when I say funny, I mean talking in a British accent. It’s just about the only impersonation I can do). When the Bear woke up, I’d make all sorts of grumbly, cranky, angry noises I imagine a bear would make if he were woken up from his hibernation (hope I didn’t ruin the book for you).

Now, every time I make the noises, he makes them along with me. Which got me to thinking, shouldn’t he be doing this with all his books? He loves to read, but it seems like we were missing out on so much more fun.

So I pulled out an ABC book with lots of pictures. I started asking him where the apple was, where the butterfly was, where the cat was, and so on and so forth.

The first few times, nothing. But imagine my surprise when I asked him where the butterfly was. He pointed and said “butter.” I was floored.

So now I try to make reading as much a two-way, fun activity as possible. It’s much better to explore and imagine things when you’ve got a fun playmate to do it with along the way.

About a month or so ago, my son became a real person. Before, he’d make sounds and gestures pretty indiscriminately. He could imitate us, but it felt like he was living in his own alternate reality.

But then one day he started pointing at things. He started asking “What’s that?” He still makes lots of babble talk, but there’s a flow and rhythm to it. You can talk back to him, he’ll think a moment, and then say “blah da ma!”

He’s also learning to ask for things by reaching out his hands and whining.  At this stage, how you interact with your toddler is key for helping them learn associations between words and objects in the real world.

When your toddler asks for something, encourage them to say the name of it. When my son reaches for some of my pasta, we say “Would you like some pasta?” The response is usually “Mas-tah” or something even further from the word. But like I wrote before, mispronounciations are O.K.

They’ll quickly learn that to get something they want, they need to ask for that object. And toddlers seem to want everything, so he’ll learn tons of words just by being himself.

Encourage your toddler to use his words rather than just letting him point and whine. It’ll do wonders for his vocabulary.

The 1st birthday party gifts introduced us to some fantastic new books that my son loves to flip through by himself and have his mom and dad read to him.

If you haven’t heard of them and want to read something besides I Know an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly twelve times a day, check these out.

• Bear Snores On - A brown bear slumbers in his cold, dark cave while all the other animals in the forest have a party. This one is a TON of fun to read and act out, especially when the bear finally wakes up.
• Baby Einstein Alphabooks - A book for every single letter of the alphabet. Each one has three words and pictures associated with the letter. My son loves to go through all of them and open them himself. It’s a great way to teach the alphabet, we work on the same five letters every day for memory. And then he has fun surprising himself when we go through the rest of them for fun!
• Baby Cakes - This one always gets my son moving when we sing it to him. It’s a catchy rhyme that you can easily act out and get them to play along with as your baby’s toes, nose, hug them tight and laugh out loud.

My son is starting to discover different parts of his body - whenever he’s shirtless he’ll pat his stomach whenever we say “Where’s your belly?.”

I’m starting to notice he’s learning about faces too. He knows eyes, nose, mouth, ears, etc. But we’re running into a slight problem. Instead of just pointing to the body part, he’ll jam his finger right into eye sockets, nostrils and mouth.

So how do you fix it?

Here’s an idea. When you’re showing your baby body parts, always lay your hand over the body part. Rather than teach them to point, teach them to cover up their eyes, nose or mouths.

Then, when they go show off to other babies, you or your pets, hopefully they’ll just cover up stuff on the face. They won’t be hurting anyone and you’re teaching them to be sensitive in certain situations.

How do you deal with a baby that always pokes and prods at sensitive body parts?