Our youngest has reached that delightful age where he's really working hard on learning to speak. Not that he's been a quiet boy until now - oh no - he has a fine set of pipes on him and has always been very vocal. I say vocal, what I mean is very very loud. I blame my wife.

But anyway, he's now learning words and manages a few new ones every day. Here at home he's increasingly able to tell us what he wants without having to point. Being typical proud parents we're delighted with his cute little voice and the many things he can now say. And like many proud parents we're somewhat deluded by our little monkey's language abilities.

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Sure most people will probably recognise his "bus", "car", "tractor", "look", "train", "digger" and perhaps even "blast off". But the rest, I'm not so sure. We spend hours with him every day and his every utterance makes some kind of sense to us. Yet I suspect that if you heard him speak you'd probably not get much of his meaning unless he was discussing vehicles with you.

It's that familiarity that enables us to understand "bot" - bottle, "befethththt" - breakfast and "babbas" - pasta. So while we're proud of our little one's progress we have to be realistic. That however doesn't stop it being a really magical, cute and gorgeous time. We hang on his every - mangled - word.

One thing that we can justly be proud of is how polite our little one is. When asking for something he tends to say "please" and says "thank you" when he is given something. Well sort of "thank you", because when we give him things we've often said "there you go" he's decided that's what you say when you mean thanks. But it is very cute the way he says "there you go" when given something.