Z is for Zowie!

So I have finally exhausted the alphabet. I'm not sure what I want to do next. On the one hand, having a loose structure was often helpful for me. On the other hand, there were days I resented having to come up with something fitting a particular letter. So I'm going to mull over my next moves.

This blog has been depressing lately, so on to more fun updates:

After months of not speaking, J finally started talking, as I chronicled here a while ago. Then, in the past few weeks, he has decided to catapult forward in language development and catch up with or outstrip his age peers. Before now, he has been speaking in one word statements, sometimes spoken close together but clearly separate from one another. For instance, when told he was going to go visit our friend Becca, he would say "Caca!" (his name for her) then "Julia!" (her daughter's name), then "Car!" then "Big!" (to distinguish her big van from our car) then "Blue!" (the color of her van) then "Go!" then "Now!" You get the idea. Lots of information, but just in one word statements.

Then he started with combining two words, often in reverse order, such as "Puppy big" or "block yellow." On of the things I have noticed about the two word combinations is that he is trying very hard to be precise with his ending consonants. For example, when he says "Tink Tanther" (Pink Panther, one of his favorite cartoons), there is a distinct pause between the two words as he wraps his tongue around that K sound. And the R sound at the end lasts a very long time. He seems to be working on clarity with some phrases, though not so much with others: Charlie Brown sounds like "tra-ouwn"

And then, on Easter Sunday, he walked into our bedroom, came up by the bed, and said "I eat Cheerios, Mommy." Complete declarative statement! Huzzah! Later that day, he said "Easter eggs ready, Mommy," and he was off to the verbal races. Since then, the sentences have been coming faster and faster each day. Today he said "I climb high, Daddy" while demonstrating how he had scaled the husband's torso. Along with the sentences, has come his understanding of pronouns, particularly me and I. He is still working on tenses, but this week he also showed he knows how to use possessives. So J's verbal development has finally caught up with all the rest of him.

Like his sense of, I don't know, humor? The other day, while we were all sick, I was on the bed bouncing E on my stomach, covered in three blankets while shivering through a fever. J was jumping around on the bed next to us, until he got bored and decided to stand in the windowsill and pull on the curtains, both big no no's around here. But I couldn't move to stop him, so finally I resorted to the "I am going to tell Daddy all the things you are doing right now and he will be very unhappy when he gets home" tactic, at which point J sat down, leaned into my face, put his finger to his lips, and said dramatically "SHHHHHHH!" Umm, he's two. Isn't that too young for sarcastic back talk and ironic word play??? I thought so!