My son, a month older, knew the letter A and the number 5. He had to know five – his grandmother counts to five with him every time she sees him and I taught him how to High Five months ago. Couldn’t really explain though why he hadn’t picked up the first four numbers.

But with a bit of prompting, once we say 1 now, or 1 and 2, he usually follows up with the next few numbers. Curiously, though, he always knows 4 now and also 6 but sometimes skips 5. When we read him Sandra Boynton’s ‘Hippos Go Berserk’, in addition to screaming out ‘Bus’ as several of the hippos leave the party on a bus, he always stops and yells ‘Four’ when 4 hippos arrive. We aren’t sure why he knows 6, other than it comes after 5 and 7 isn’t far behind. We think 4 is on his mind because that’s the floor he lives on so he’s always pushing that number on the elevator (although by that logic, he should also know the letter L because he’s always pushing it for lobby).

Anyway, he’s getting there.

But he has high expectations of other little folks – in his mind they should all welcome the opportunity to share their scooters, and balls and water bottles, or whatever else he sets his sights on.

Walking through Central Park yesterday and Saturday no toy was safe. If the speed at which he goes after a loose ball indicates how good an athlete he’ll be, I am very excited.

In one case Saturday afternoon, he spotted a small red soccer ball and made a beeline for it. The 2- or 3-year-old boy to whom it belonged – we’ll call him JoJo, that’s what his mother did — wasn’t having any of it. He grabbed it away with a ‘No, mine’ shriek.

My son was not dissuaded. He moved over 10 feet to where Jojo’s larger, plastic playground ball (you know, the kind you’d get out of those supermarket cages). Jojo reclaimed that one too. The same act repeated when my son found Jojo’s whiffle ball. 

Finally I remembered that we had a tennis ball in the bottom of the stroller. I retrieved it, handed it to my son. He threw it several feet. Of course Jojo reached it first and picked it up.

Jojo’s parents must be communists. Ownership is a nebulous concept.

When my son tried to get his tennis ball back, Jojo just pulled it away and yelled ‘No,mine’.

I wasn’t a regular — I only know his name because he showed up as a contestant once on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. The music is folksy, ok a bit sappy sometimes, and his leftist, lonely heart spiel is the same most weekends. But it was a great place to sit and relax, people-watch and wonder what drew them all there. 

I hadn’t gone the past few years but what will draw me there every chance I get for now on is that my son loves music and seemed to have a ball when we stopped by Saturday afternoon.

He got out of his stroller and danced, and rolled around the grass, and mostly clapped when he heard the crowd clapping.

So we’ll be back. There just won’t be much of a chance for people-watching because I have to keep my eye on my son and keep him from running into the lake.

He has nothing to worry about. Turns out it was just stubbornness, not hearing impairment or disrespect.

Our toddler now sits in the living room of our 4th floor apartment and screams out each time he hears a city bus near the stop on the corner. It’s very impressive.

Now while hearing isn’t an issue, pronouncing the letter ’s’ might be. As the M7 or M11 approaches our block, my son breaks into a smile, points to the window and yells out ‘Bu, Bu’.

While there he went on several adventures and got to know his 6-month-old cousin. He climbed stairs which he doesn’t have at home. He grabbed a broom every chance he got and swept the kitchen floor – although it confused him a bit because it had a sponge on one side and a brush on the other. He scavenged under a glass table, bumping his head most times he emerged. And he leaned against the living-room window for peeks outside – with a relatively boring view considering the suburban block my parents live on can’t offer the Manhattan taxicabs, buses, firetrucks, and delivery men on bikes he’s used to.

He woke up so early Friday that it was still dark outside. When he couldn’t see anything beyond one window, he ambled over a few feet to look behind the next shade. Nope, same view of the dark.

We brought along his favorite toys and books. But he didn’t have his little kitchen, or his toy chest or his regular high chair or the neighbor kids playing in the hallway. 

So when the long drive ended and we walked back into the apartment, my 16-month-old had one plan: he walked straight over to his little blue chair, folded himself over the arm and buried his face in the seat. 

Today, he’ll probably have a play date with his favorite Swiffer broom.

She spent quite a long time online and came up with some possible costumes: a bumble-bee, a cuddly lion, a UPS delivery man and a cute, fuzzy bear. The ears were off on some, the bumble-bee looked fat and the UPS outfit would have just been weird.

We settled on the cuddly lion and ordered it, and were told it would arrive in plenty of time for the holiday. The package arrived four days earlier but we were too busy to open it up until last Monday, the day before Purim.

When my wife finally did, inside the box was …. a duck costume.

It didn’t look anything like a lion, in fact, it didn’t look much like a duck. And it wasn’t even particularly cute. The body was made of tiny little yellow feathers that were shedding even inside the bag. And my son had worn a duck hat on the holiday last year.

We decided to return it and my wife went to a store Tuesday and found a replacement – a puppy costume with floppy ears and paws.

He was adorable. We took lots of pictures. His grandparents kvelled.

My wife, the Jewish mother, though, still thinks he would have made a great lion.

This is a shot that engenders much fear in parents because it tells them whether their kids’ toys or apartment paint are shedding dangerous levels of lead. But that wasn’t my focus when I realized that the shot would be in my son’s arm and he’d be looking right at the needle. All his other shots have been to the upper thigh, usually just quick stabs. Painful, of course, but not the long, drawn out ordeal he was about to face.

As I held my son’s arm in place, the technician, whose hand was shaking to begin with, wrapped the tourniquet around his upper arm and began searching for a vein. He couldn’t find one. He went to the other arm, couldn’t find one there either, and ended up calling a colleague to help him.

By then, my son knew what was up and began howling. They finally found a vein and he screamed even louder as the needle went in. When the technician switched collection tubes, he tapped at the needle to better draw the blood. Each time he tapped, the needle tugged at the skin a little more. My son was already so upset about the shot that he might not have realized it. But I felt each little tap.

My son was not a happy camper during that cold stroll back to our apartment. But he soon forgot it and was fine within an hour or so, walking around and chewing everything in sight.

Hopefully, all the extracurricular eating he does won’t add up to significant lead levels in his blood.

My son is a bit too young to appreciate Metallica. He’s 14-months-old. Although he does stomp around the apartment like he’s ready to smash a guitar or bite off the head of a chicken.

No, Laurie Berkner is more his speed. If you don’t know about Laurie Berkner, she’s the rage among little kids and toddlers. Okay, she has been for the better part of a decade but I’d never heard of her until my wife handed me a CD a few months back at the start of a long drive.

I must admit I didn’t quite get the attraction early on. Actually, by the first exit on the NJ Turnpike I was ready to tear my hair out. But it was keeping him relaxed and who wants to drive with a cranky kid.

Some of the lyrics seemed a bit, how should I say it, ridiculous. And as we got into the DVDs, I wondered about what he might be learning from these songs. There was one about chickens where she had the little groupies shaking eggs really hard. That’s fine if they were soon to be scrambled – but what if they were the little chick variety and these kids were giving them permanent brain damage. Really, these were things I thought about.

But my son was mesmerized. He really enjoys the songs and even dances a bit to them. If you count two steps back, one step forward dancing. (We do)

So what really counts is that I can sit there with my son, humming along, watching him break out into a smile each time that pig shows up on Laurie’s head. Which will be fine until he’s ready to sing along to Van Morrison and The Band.

And lately the songs are growing on me.

There’s one about Victor Vito and Freddie Fasco that’s particularly catchy and includes words like Tabasco, rutabaga and collared greens. How can you complain about a kids song that has the words Tabasco,  rutabaga and collared greens?

So, yes, sometimes I find myself singing “Victor Vito” or “Under a Shady Tree” or “We are the Dinosaurs”.

Which Jorge is happy about because it means I no longer sing “Cripple Creek” all day long at my desk.

Okay maybe she didn’t promise. But we should have had her define ‘through the night’. His version is nothing like what we were led to believe.

Now 13 months, he goes to bed between 6 and 7 pm, depending on how many times he interrupts his bottle or book reading to march back and forth across his room waving a piece of paper, or a block, or his teddy bear or whatever else is at hand. 

When he finally has enough milk, one of four things happens: the bottle is finished and he has fallen asleep and we put him in the crib; the bottle is finished, he pushes it away and goes off on another marchfest; the bottle isn’t finished but he’s asleep and we put him in the crib; the bottle isn’t finished, he pushes it away and goes off on another marchfest. 

Options 1 and 3, we love. Options 2 and 4 usually extend bedtime by 30 to 45 minutes. But its OK. He’s adorable and usually in good spirits at this point. 

He routinely wakes up after that sometime between 10 and midnight. 

There is nothing cuter than the half-asleep pose he assumes sitting there in a corner of his crib. There is nothing more frustrating than not knowing what it is he wants since he’s not talking to us yet (I mean, he’s talking but we have no idea what he’s saying). Sometimes, it takes another bottle, sometimes a diaper change, sometimes a walk around the apartment in the stroller. 

I’ve heard people put their young kids into the car and drive around the block a few times. I live in Manhattan. I’ll do anything for my son short of give up a parking spot.

Getting back to ‘through the night’, the hardest part is when he wakes up for good, usually between 4 and 5 in the morning. Through the night should mean ‘until it’s light out’ or at least when I can raise the blinds and show him something other than the bread and newspaper trucks.

When I’m really, really, really tired I put on a DVD of one of the original Sesame Street episodes, stick him in the Pack n’ Play and slink off back to bed. He usually cries for a few minutes but then gets that deer in headlights look when he’s mesmerized by a television show. 

One morning the reprieve lasted just 24 minutes. When I went to the living room to see what had happened, I realized I had put on Jack’s Big Music Show instead of Sesame Street. Lesson of that day was to always make sure to set him up with an hour-long show.