A lot of toddlers and infants out there do look to me like someone has dosed them with sedatives. We called them blanket babies, the ones that would happily just sit wherever they were put.

The other thing I notice about other toddlers is all the stuff they say that is just wrong. Not pretending/fantasy, but just wrong, just draw wildly off conclusions. From when he could talk, if DS didn't know something he said he didn't know. I guess maybe there's a lot of kids that just like to say things for the sake of being verbal, rather than due to an interest in the content. Speaking of which, DS never did that baby jargon thing where the baby sounds like it's talking but is just complex babbling, he waited until he could talk. Probably not related.

I know one family who's kids are all like zombies for the first 18 months and then it's as if someone turns a dial and they start getting more and more active both physically and mentally. They are not PG, but not average either, they seem pretty bright. Their mom gets all wistful missing the infant stage. (Not me, DS started out at the same tempo he goes now, he got exponentially easier with walking and talking). In toddlerhood I think each of this family's kids must be horribly delayed and then a year or two later there they are saying very reasonable things. Maybe developmental trajectories really vary that much and can still be entirely normal?

A PG brother of mine, very alert in the delivery room but truly a boring looking blanket baby: he's low on motivation as an adult (he would likely term it being "energy efficient", LOL), but the brightest person I know. An exception. Or is there no rule?

As an aside, DS4 is really oral still, but so is his dad, who could walk around for an hour with a toothbrush just chewing on it. A sensory thing I guess, they both love raw carrots.

Polly