HELLOHELLOHELLOHELLO

Every once in a while I am going to simply bubble forth about my son. It’s inevitable.

For a while he talked about bananas, for a while he talked about bubbles, for a while he talked about going outside, but at about 19 months this the roster of subjects that interest him:

Eyes

Kitties

Dogs

Babies

Keys

Cars

Airplanes and trains and boats and trucks, all called TRUCK!

Toes

Shoes

He also says hi to everyone now, even (especially?) if they are an animal. Though, for dogs, he inhales as deeply and dramatically as possible, then says, with great purpose, WOOF. To be clear, that is now one of my main activities, too. We do that together, and then laugh and laugh. He also sometimes does that for birds or other things that are . . . alive. Or might be alive, if they weren’t drawn into a book.

He’s not a huge talker, though. He’s often happy to rely upon nodding when asked a question. Sometimes he gives a very cheerful “YEHSS!” or the more casual “Ah-yay” or even shortens it to “aye,” like a sweet little Irish sailor. That is my favorite, no contest.

“No,” however, is said almost in an angry and perturbed tone of . . . yell. Even if I’m asking something he might genuinely like to do, I get the full petulant teenager treatment.

Today he started walking down the hall saying HELLOHELLOHELLOHELLO, but in an inexperienced enough way to have his tongue flop out of his mouth every time he gets to the “l” sound, so that the sound becomes off balance, and the LO becomes louder than the HEH. LOhehLOhehLOhehLO. Then he turned around and lunged in the other direction saying DOHBAI, DOHBAI, DOHBAI, DOHBAI which is goodbye in Henryese.

That was fun, but it got better later, when during bedtime prep he took one of his socks off (he likes to see his toes pretty regularly) and put the sock on his hand, and started crunching his hand open and closed saying “LOhehLOhehLOhehLO.”

In short, he made a PUPPET! A sock puppet!

This, and one other specific moment, when he pretended to eat a very small plastic cat at brunch the other day, by making gobbling noises and having it disappear to the side of his open mouth, make me think that this might be the start of imaginative play.

Pretending to eat small plastic cats with gobbling noises and an obvious effort to just stick them to the side of your mouth is right up my alley. That, and the sock puppet: this is fun.