I Laaa Vu!

There is nothing sweeter than hearing someone say sinerely, “I love you!” Kenny, for all of his verbal skills, had yet, until today, initiate that phrase. He would repeat it, but for some reason, he always whispered it, as if it was a phrase too grown-up for him to say out loud.

While we were out on our walk today, I was on a marathon of silly songs at his demand, and included one that I have rarely sung, with the words, “I love you” repeated at the end of each line. Four hours later, while we were eating lunch, Kenny suddenly looked up and shouted, “I Laaaa VU!” Then he sang a couple of the lines from the song to me. I was flabergasted! He’s sung little bits of songs before, mainly “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” and “The Itsy Bitsy Spider,” but those are songs he hears at least several times a day. This one was fairly new, yet he caught on right away to the fact that he was able to sing “I love you” and see me beam back at him.

He is also starting to chime in on his bedtime prayers. If we say his “Now I lay me” slowly enough, he will repeat each line, sometimes saying the next line in the pause. We also say The Lord’s Prayer, and he has started to say many of the lines along with us, always excited to shout out “…and the Glory forever!” only his sounds more like, “an da Ga-LOW-ree ever!”

His speaking skills are not without their challenges, though. As he gets more and more used to me understanding what he’s telling me, when there is a word he says that I don’t get, it leads to much frustration. (See Milaka’s comment from a few posts ago for a sweet story on that!) Most of the time, I don’t get it because he’s throwing something out there that’s completely out of context. For example, in the car today, he kept yelling “Mommy Plash!” and I racked my brain, until I realized that he was telling me that he wanted me to go into the pool with him and splash the water. Once I caught on, he was all excitement and puffed up and eager for Daddy to get home so that we could go swiming.

In the meantime, I think I could teach a course on toddler linguistics after listening to this kid talk nonstop day after day. I wonder where he gets the chatterbox gene from??