E-nun-ci-a-tion

Wyatt's vocabulary is blossoming much faster than his enunciation is. I can't tell you how many times a day we roll with laughter as I try to understand him, asking him to repeat it just one more time, and he always does, giggling at his dumb mommy. Tonight, I was putting up laundry in the dresser as he bounced on our bed, continuously repeating this one phrase. After about ten repititions, I finally figured out he was saying, "I Triple Ripple Toucan. Squak! Squak!" Yeah! That's a sentence I would expect out of his mouth! He was pretending to be Triple Ripple Toucan, a bird in a Strawberry Shortcake book we read two days ago. Mommy needs a little more context!

This week, he learned the concept of "friend," so one morning, he started through his list of friends: "Jonah (the cat) my friend. Fish my friends. Allana my friend." I tried to extend that list by saying "Jacob is your friend." Nope. Not gonna have it. Well, I guess mommy was wrong! He also learned the concept of "I can't" this week. Ugh. That is such an awful phrase. "Go potty Wyatt." "No. I can't pee pee. I can't poo. I can't!" And then he goes in his diaper.

Imagination and make-believe is huge with Wyatt right now. And he recreates the scenes from all his books, which is adorable to watch, but he reads so many books that, well, I just can't keep up with the vocabulary list to know which words he could know and say. Tonight, he was in the tub having his monkies reinact Oh Bother, Someone's Afraid of the Dark, a Winnie the Pooh book. From this book, he's learned the words "shadow," "Heffalump," "a howling boo," and "constellation." You haven't lived until you've heard a 2-year-old say, "Hey! Look! A constellation!" This evening's theatrical show involved him having one monkey say, "It's probably a Heffalump" and the other monkey replying, "No, it's just an alarm clock." Doug and I just cracked up.

We are to blame for all these big words. We love to read and both our careers involve daily writing. So, we just naturally have extensive vocabularies that we use at home around Wyatt, mostly unintentionally. It was adorable to start with, teaching him that tomatoes have lycopene. So, now when he sees a tomato, he shrieks "Lycopene!" But until he learns to enunciate, he needs a translator. Everybody normally comes to me for the translation. And even I am finding that the more words he learns, the more it sounds like he's speaking a foreign language.