My toddler has always been slightly behind his development milestones, but always reached them shortly after. Definitely a kid who has stalls and then explosions of development rather than steady progress.
He spoke single words quite quickly and had a huge range of vocab, but didn’t put more than two word sentences together until he was around 2 years and 3 months. His speech is really clear and he can form full sentences now - really good at telling us what he wants -“where has my tractor gone, let’s go look for it in the playroom” and takes my hand to lead me there. “Mummy, please make me a snack”. He has a level of imaginative play, prob not on par with other 3 year olds I know but it is there - he said our washing up tub was a boat he needed to get in and he makes ice creams and coffees for ua with his toys. Has loads of eye contact, very affectionate Great at following instructions (when in the right mood haha) and can compromise with him.
However, there is very limited conversation or back and forth with him. If I say “did you ride on your bike today” he would just ignore the question. He will ask questions and his fav is “what you doing?” atm. He never answers “yes” to a question, if I said “do you want breakfast?” He would reply “want breakfast”. He rarely answers questions unless it’s us asking about something he wants at that point, whilst other kids I know his age will respond yes or no questions like “do you like tractors? Yes” - my son wouldn’t do this even though he does love them. However if I said, “before we get a puzzle out, we need to tidy up your toy cars” - he will help me tidy them all away. Does this sound developmentally normal? I’d love to have more conversations with my son which I can with other children his age, but I know his understanding is great, and he will do this a little more with other people (my aunty asked him what he had for dinner and he said “pie” and I was shocked as he would not do that with us) Wondering how I can encourage this more?