Two years old

In the last year, Poldy has learned to walk, talk, run, jump, dance, imagine, tell stories, kiss, cuddle...oh and throw a basketball through a hoop.


Any one of those achievements alone is staggering, but in the context of a list like that, it all just blurs into one extraordinary year. Other milestones have been his first interstate and international travel, his first experience at child care, his first solo trip down a slide, his first (proper) visit to a beach and to the zoo.

Poldy at two runs all the time (it's his default setting). His signature move is the 'spin-and-drop', but he has recently shown interest in learning to do a 'cart-and-wheel'. He vastly favours vehicles of flight - rockets, space ships and aeroplanes - to earthbound ones, and 'blast off' is his favourite phrase. He can count to ten, but says 'nine' instead of 'five'. He knows his own full name. He is quite a lot less shy than he used to be, but he is still eminently self-posessed. Yet he very rarely refuses his Mumma and Dadda a kiss and a cuddle, and sometimes offers the most precious ones unprompted. He has at least a dozen different voices, is almost impossible to sleep in a bed with, and is perhaps the funniest person on the planet.

A handful of our favourite moments:
Long past midnight, a wide-awake, jetlagged Poldy in bed with us in New York squeezes my nose repeatedly, saying 'Honk'.
Leaving his Nanna and Papa's place in the dark to get into the car, he commentates: 'Into the dark cave of mystery.'
He bolts laps of the house, repeating 'I'm a gingerbread man, I'm a gingerbread man!'; he does the same on tiptoes, and 'I'm a mermaid, I'm a mermaid!'; he starts to gallop: 'What are you now?' 'A camel!'
He showers his Dadda with kisses when meeting him at the airport after being apart for two weeks.