[I realise I’m muddying the appellative waters by referring to the Little Monkey as a dinosaur, but normal simian service will be resumed after this post.] I seem to constantly be writing about how surprised I am by some aspect or other of our baby’s growth and development. This week it is the range of noises that Toby makes; at two weeks I commented on sneezes and other ‘human’ noises, but he’s got a whole suite of squawks and cries now. He often does a very cute little sighing noise after sneezes (which typically come in pairs), which Mrs. Monkeyshines and I love. There’s an auditory ensemble of gurgles, some contented, other less so, but which sometimes start to sound a bit like a chuckle. And there are different types of crying that indicate distress or hunger or tiredness, or some combination thereof, which his mother is now getting very good at discriminating.
But sometimes he’ll make a bizarre, ethereal noise that you can’t quite believe has come from a baby; Mrs. Monkeyshines characterised one such noise perfectly, as the squawk of a velociraptor. Another time he woke me in the the middle of the night with a piercing owl’s hoot (he immediately fell asleep again, if indeed he ever woke up – it took me longer to drop off, feeling a strange mixture of spooked and amused). It’ll almost be a shame when he starts talking…
Two footnotes: while searching for a velociraptor audio file (fruitlessly, as it turned out – it’s almost as if they didn’t have recording devices 72 million years ago), I found a saurian soulmate for Toby in New York, and discovered, courtesy of the Oatmeal, that: 
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