Words and Songs

Liam was positively gleeful after being allowed to climb up the stairs in his birthday suit on his way to the bath. (the leaf is a bit of photoshop by the way, not a leaf stuck on with scotch tape)

It's been rather rainy here since late January, so we haven't had many skiing adventures with Liam, except for this weekend. He and I went for a ski on Sunday afternoon, and he happily rode along in the baby backpack. At one point, I heard him say 'uh-oh', to indicate that his shoe was falling off. Boy, was I glad he let me know his boot was falling off - it would have been a drag to ski back to find it.

Liam has been starting to find his voice over the last few weeks. When we go out and about around town, he'll say 'hi' to passing strangers, and people we meet. He will point and say something in toddler talk, and then we'll look together and try to learn the word. His new language acquisition is ramping up too. We taught him to say 'Obama' the other day, and 'touchdown', complete with arms raised in the touchdown signal. He's learning a couple of nursery rhymes - Twinkle Twinkle and Ring around the Rosie. Instead of 'Ashes, ashes', it's 'Ash-y, Ash-y, all fall down!' And then he needs s little help to fall onto his bottom. That and the refrain of 'Twinkle Twinkle'. Every now and then he'll shock us with some word or short phrase we had no idea he knew - like 'jack-in-the-box' for example. Today it was 'egg' and the other day 'cracker'. He already had 'cheese'. And he knows that 'outside' means he has to put on his 'hat', 'coat', and 'shoes' or 'boots'. And to our surprise, he said 'yes' this weekend; not, however, in response to a question, but in repeating 'yes' as he heard Tara or I say it. His favorite word, by far, is 'no'. Although half of the time, it's sort of a generic response to any statement from mom or dad that sounds like it might be a question.



We're also in the process of shoring up our babysitter pool. A friend of ours and professor at College of the Atlantic posted a note to the COA email-message board and we got five responses in just a few days. So far, we've met two of the students and they seem really nice. We're going to meet one more on Friday. Ideally, we want to find first year who will be around for a few years, and who doesn't have school nights or school athletics like our high school babysitters tended to have rather frequently.