Milestones Quickly Emerge

Not only is she holding her head up and able to sit in a Bumbo seat (for 5-10 minutes at a time, before her head gets a tad too heavy), but this past week Karissa also made a very successful transition to her crib for nighttime sleep. We're still keeping our fingers crossed and hoping we don't jinx ourselves. So - knock on wood, and all that goes with that. She now spends more time awake through the day, which is a great thing. Her eyes sparkle, her smiles more often. She's eating well and growing well and she's normally good for sleep between 10pm and 6 or maybe 7am. She does most of her daytime naps on her tummy but we have not given in to the nighttime tummy sleep, so she is on her back. And again - no swadlle, feet and arms sprawled all around just like she likes it.
Kole continues to baffle us with his development of words. He's very good about saying 'please' and 'thank you', but is not sure of the appropriate times to use them. He'll say 'please' over and over and over again, into a frenzied whining state, without ever saying exactly what he wants, please.
So we ask - "Do you want juice?"
Kole: "Please!" (in proper, phonetic Kole-talk he say ah-peez, two syllables, for some reason)
"Do you want milk?"
"Ah-peez!"
"Kole - what do you want? You have to tell Daddy."
"Ah-peez!"
This goes on and on. Tho other abnormality is for him to say "thank you" as he takes something without asking.
As we train him to say "thank you" we say it to him as he's receiving something he wants - a cookie, juice, a toy, etc. Hand it over, we say "thank you", in a way that demands an echo - "thank you" he then responds (phonetically: tain-too). So he takes the verbal cue as something said upon getting something. We could be sitting on the couch with a telephone sitting next to us, maybe after just having gotten on to him for getting too handsy with the phone (he's actually called people by just screwing around pushing buttons), but then he'll walk right back up as if nothing was said, grab the phone and say emphatically - "thank you!", since that's the words he associates with getting something he wants now.
And it still blows my mind away into itsy-bitsy pieces that I'm nearly 40, I have a 2-year-old and nearly 3-month old. But that doesn't hold a candle to the fact that I still find myself having to say the following words just to change the boy's diaper: "Honey - where's the duct tape?"