15 Month Checkup

Luke recently had his 15 month check up and the milestone checklist went like this:

Q.How many words does he know?
A.10
Q. Has he put two words together?
A. Yes. (This isn't really true, it just sounded true to me at the time. Unless "Ruff, Gwirl" counts.)
Q. Can he stack blocks?
A. Yes.
Q. 4 blocks?
A. No
Q. Two blocks?
A. Yes
Q. If you put a crayon in his hand does he scribble?
A. Yes
Q. etc. etc. etc
A. Yes. Yes. Yes
Q. Does he imitate you doing housework?
A. ? (queue crickets chirping.)

OK. of course I said yes. As you can see above, I assume that Jack is a borderline genius, or at least on track, so the answer to all questions must be yes, so I don't have to think about them very hard. I was obsessed with Luke's milestones, and I know he was behind on the block stacking, so I was surprised when I saw Jack stack a block and I made a mental note of it for the checkup. But as usual, I answered yes to everything and then came home and ran through the list with Dave and friends to see where I had exaggerated. We agreed that he isn't really putting two words together. And that, "does he imitate you doing housework?" seems to be a question left over from an earlier era.

He imitates me working on my laptop. He imitates me talking on the phone. He takes knives out of the dishwasher. But that is probably less about imitating and more about augmenting his weapons cache that I can only imagine is somewhere behind some curtains, with his emergency food supplies. Also, when Aunt Suzy said, "Come here kitty" and patted her knees, Jack patted his knees. So clearly, he can imitate people... But hmm, housework?

Now I could go two ways with this:
1.) How sexist! Why ask if he can imitate me doing housework? Why not ask about the million other things I do? Why not just ask if he imitates me?
2.) Ha ha ha, I never do housework, so how could he even know how to imitate me?

But the more I think about it, the more I think that it would be great if Jack was imitating me doing housework. While it's true that I am not the best housekeeper in the world, and it's also true that I outsource a lot of the housekeeping, I still do a lot of housekeeping, and so does Dave. But a lot of it happens after kids are in bed, during nap time, and before they wake up in the morning. And maybe if more of that happened when the kids were awake, then there would be more imitating. And by imitating I mean, I can't believe I have two little indentured servants in the house and I haven't been making them work for their keep!