I can has Cwah-sahn?

So Oscar can now count to ten.

We're not really sure when or how this happened, but suddenly last week, he could count to ten. They were as surprised to learn of this at daycare as we were. Apparently it's one of those things Sue's been working on with him. I swear, every time she takes him for a day, we pick him up and he's learned some improbable new trick -- one week it was "Please" and "Thank you," the next it was jumping, and now he just won't shut up about linear algebra.

Is this normal? He can count to ten. It's not long division, but he's freakin' 21 months old.

One downside to his snowballing development of late: daycare is moving him to a new room, in a new building, in the new year. Shogo will be moving with him, but it'll be hard. Oscar has not taken well to moving rooms in the past, let alone an entirely new building filled with strange big kids, so this portends at least a couple weeks of intense separation anxiety and general misery around the Arnold-Nessel estate before he settles into the new routine.

We had a taste of that last week, when he went through a particularly nasty bout of teething, fussing nonstop, drooling buckets and waking every hour in the night bawling. I think we had him on about a quart of Infant Tylenol a day. Probably his molars coming in. This was preceded by an incident report at school -- apparently he was hitting other kids, or slapping at them, anyway. I suspect a connection to the teething.

Other than that, he's delightful. At bedtime (and occasionally other times), he'll say "I love you." He likes to play-sleep, curling up and saying "Sleep! Night-night!"

And if there was any doubt that he was a true cosmopolitan Manhattan baby, last week, Jen was in line with him at Ceci-Cela when he said, with a perfect Parisian accent, "Croissant?"