Thantum

I've had these two pictures sitting in the draft section of my blog for about three months now and I'm thinking it's time to publish them on my blog. I don't exactly have a story to tell with them except that I wanted to take a few pictures with Ben and he didn't want to spend time with me since he had just learned how to walked the previous week. He ended up falling and hurting himself which placed him in less of a mood to have a camera in front of him.

Many of the stories I have with Ben are short and perhaps I will begin to write them down even if there isn't a picture to go along with the text. At about 13 months Ben began saying his first words, on one particular day during our morning walk around the block I gave him a handful of Gerber Graduate Puffs. While he was sitting in his stroller he signaled that he had eaten all his treats and wanted more. I grabbed a handful to place in his small tray and as I began to place them down he looked up at me and said "Thantum!" I was surprised yet quickly exclaimed "Good job, Ben!" The more interesting part is that not a second later Ben placed his hands together and shouted, "Aahh." It was his simple little one word prayer, "Amen".

I often find myself amazed at how much he understands me at such an early age. Just last week I mentioned to Ben that we needed to find his shoes and socks before we went outside. I continued getting myself prepared to leave the house meanwhile Ben went to his room and brought me a sock and a shoe. It completely caught me off guard since I was not expecting him to understand me, especially to go look and find shoes and socks. It's pretty amazing if you think about it. Most grown-ups can't find a way out of being lazy and have others fetch their clothes... Way to be outdone by a 15 month old kid.

About a month ago Ben took a plastic shovel over to the neighbors house and eventually lost interested when he saw the neighbors toys. Eventually he noticed that the neighbor's little girl had picked it up and that made him want his toy back. They are only a few months apart so he began chasing her in circles yelling "Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!" If you think about it, what else could you say when you have a limited vocabulary.

All of this makes me wonder how useful is it to speak baby talk to kids? From skipping words to taking the "R" out of words, are we doing them any good? Ben understand way more than I give him credit and he will have to relearn how to talk if he continues hearing baby talk. This past week he said "Awesome."... Gee, I wonder where he learned that? Now if I can only get the words, "like" and "dude" out of my vocabulary.