Growing vocabulary

This whole talking thing is quite a trip. Charlie still isn’t speaking in sentences, other than very occasionally, but he does now say tons of words, including some three-syllable ones. He confuses a lot of consonants, and I predict that the speech therapist is going to spend a lot of time on his pronunciation, but he’s moving forward with leaps and bounds. His teacher is noticing too; Friday’s note said, “Awesome! Charlie was full of things to say today – answering questions, commenting, requesting – what a star!”  I love his teacher and how positive and encouraging she is!

Charlie wants to know the name of everything right now. He points at things he doesn’t know and expects us to tell him what they are. He’s big on body parts, and we knew it was inevitable that he was going to start pointing while he was undressed and we were going to have to figure out how to handle it. All the nicknames for these things make me cringe, so I decided we were going to teach him the actual words – well, at least for some of them. So now he refers to his “peemish” whenever we change his diaper. He likes to say, “Bye, bye peemish” when I put a new diaper on him. I try very hard not to laugh in the hopes that I won’t encourage body part humor, but it’s hard!

I took Charlie to the grocery store with me yesterday, and he had a blast reading all the numbers and counting. Two different people stopped to comment on how smart he is. Pretty cool. He’s at the stage where he’s starting to memorize parts of his favorite stories too, and sometimes he’ll “read” the words for me. I’m constantly surprised by the things he knows, remembers and recognizes.

Today we got out to the park for a short time, thanks to the shining sun and 40s temps we’re enjoying. Charlie was so excited to be there, and wanted to try out every single thing in the place – so he swung, went down the big slide on my lap, went down the little slide a few times on his own, climbed around on the equipment, and rode the merry-go-round. It was hard to get him to leave even when his cheeks started to glow from the cold. We are ready for spring!

Sometimes I wish I could freeze him at this stage. This morning George was still in bed and Charlie and I were downstairs reading one of his favorites, “Who Said Moo?”.  In the book, a rooster hears a moo and starts asking all the animals, “Did you say moo?” and they say, “I don’t moo. I <insert animal sound here>”.  After I say, “I don’t moo” each time, Charlie likes to chime in and make the sounds with me.  He thinks its really funny that we can meow or hee-haw or oink at the same time. It’s so fun to be able to enjoy books with him and to see his sense of humor grow.  After we finished, I said, “I love you Charlie” and he said, “I yuv you” right back, which is an improvement from what he used to say, something like,  “aahhhhhooooo”.  I knew what he meant before, but it makes me smile to hear him say it almost correctly!

Here he is relaxing in the chair Gram made him, listening to his favorite classical music CD:

Buried in stuffed animals in the chaise lounge:


This morning (Sunday), for some reason he wanted to wear his backpack around for a while. Between his little blue jeans and his backpack, he looks like such a grown-up boy to me!