Thursday, January 19, 2006

A few more noises

I still get "Dahn" instead of "Baba" every once in a while. "Mama" is now an extremely regular utterance, whether he actually needs Mirjam or wants something in general or is just running from one room to the next: "Mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah!"

I now practice going through everyone's names, in German, of course:
Jon: "Sag 'Papa!'"
William: "Baba!"
Jon: "Das bin ich! Sag 'Mama!'"
William: "Mama!"
Mirjam: "Das bin ich"
Jon: "Sag 'William!'"
William: "Ah-amm" (with just a hint of "y" and "l")
Jon: "Das bist du! Sag 'Baby'"
William: "Dee-dee!"

And just the other day, I tried asking him a couple of new names:
Jon: "Sag 'Oma!'"
William: "Ah-om"
Jon: "Sag 'Opa!'"
William: "Ah-omb"

Lobster hands

A few months ago, William found the green oven mitts lying around in the kitchen and put them onto his small hands and started walking around the condo--tottering slightly from one leg to the other--while opening and closing his little hands so that it looked like he had giant, insulated, fuzzy lobster claws attached to his little boy arms. As he strolled around from the kitchen to the living room, staring at his new monster pincers, he made the appropriate short grunts of lobster-claw hand-moving sounds: "Meh, meh, meh, meh."

I don't know where he got it from, because it's nothing we taught him to do, but he must have observed me making the lobster-hands grunting noise at some time while wearing the green oven mitts--which is not a far stretch of the imagination--because he's done it ever since he first stuck his hands in them.

He still does it, any time he gets hold of the oven mitts. Even if he's wearing his little black winter mittens, or Mirjam's big brown knit gloves, he's learned to make the same noises while pinching his little hands open and close. "Meh, meh, meh, meh."