Chatterbox

Calvin has hit his developmental "words" phase and he's been working on those skills pretty diligently these last few weeks. Calvin's second birthday (more on this in a later post) came and went with lots of activities, too much sugar, and a few new words, including "fun", "no, Vader!" and "party". Of course, there were lots of the old familiar words filling our house, like "wow, big truck!", "one more Dora?", "all better", and "Hi Ped-o, hi Deus, we're baaaack!".

Calvin says "mmm, ap-sas" while eating some applesauce.

In fact, Calvin has reached that stage where he talks ALL the time. He mutters words to himself while he's playing, repeats random words he hears us saying, and narrates his timeouts, bedtime routine, and mealtimes. He'll take a bite or two out of a chicken nugget or piece of bread, hold it up and declare "Tractor!", then move it along on an imaginary road in the space above his plate.

Calvin loves his Lego Cars and talked non-stop for an hour when he first opened them.

Calvin says a lot of "cow, cow, cow", "baa, baa", "horse", and "ladder!" while playing with his new farmhouse and animals.

He remembers names of his friends, especially "Nonner" (for Connor), "Dander" (for Zander), and "Bear-t" (for Barrett), and will point to their house or their street and say "walk, Nonner" or "tha way, Dander, tha way". His back seat driving has become much more demanding, with "Green, go, go mommy go" or "STOP!!!" (though often not at the correct times. And sometimes he replaces green with purple or orange or all the colors he can think of until getting to the correct one). His vocabulary includes numbers up to 13, and then all numbers above that are "ter-tin, ter-tin, ter-tin"... (our stairs have 16 steps so we go through a lot of numbers several times a day). It seems like every day Calvin is learning new words, and sometimes he only needs to hear it once or twice before he's got it.

So, while decorating his birthday cake a couple of weekends ago, our kitchen was filled with lots of "try?, try?, try?" and then "one more, try?, one more" repeated over and over until we either shared the glorious colorful frosting or insisted that he had had enough.

Calvin had two small rocket-ship birthday cakes for his birthday, each decorated by one of his parents. Can you guess who did what? Coincidentally, we now own two cool rocket ship cake pans. If anyone wants to borrow them, just let me know.