Chatterbox

It seems like every time we go on a trip, Jack has a major breakthrough. He started walking after our first visit to my parents' house, and he started calling me "Mommy" instead of "Nanny" after we got back from a trip to Connecticut. I think that being outside of his normal environment shakes something up inside. Whatever it is, this latest trip has been no exception.

The most obvious breakthrough is with his verbal development. The kid will not stop talking. I always suspected that he would be a chatterbox. It's in his genes (thanks, grandmas!), but he's really come into his own this past week. He is constantly chattering, and the things he says are hilarious. He has taken to calling us "Tom" and "Janis," which is still new enough to be funny. At one point, Tom did ask him, "Why are you calling me that?" He said, "That's what Mommy calls you." Fair enough.

In addition to calling us by our first names, he also sometimes refers to us as "my own special daddy" and "my own special mommy." Awww.

The other day, he sat his Pooh bear on a little bench and said, "Let's have a conversation," and then proceeded to talk about "ten butterflies" that "come in different shapes and sizes."

He's still as into numbers as ever, but I'm pleased that he is also showing a renewed interest in letters. He is constantly asking us to spell words and pointing out words in books and on signs and asking, "What's that spell?" He can recognize his name when it's printed out, as well as a couple of words, like "zoo" and "Pooh."

For the first time, he actually volunteered what happened in preschool. Usually, I just get a debrief from the teacher. When I ask Jack what he did at preschool, he is typically pretty tight-lipped. But last week, he was telling me all about a story that they read and a song that they sang. I don't know if it was because both the story and the song left a particular impression on him, but hearing about them gave me one of those moments where I thought, "This is why I don't want him in preschool." The story was "The Three Little Pigs," and it ended with the pigs boiling the wolf alive. The song was about five little monkeys being snatched out of a tree by a crocodile. I'm surprised that either was considered appropriate for toddlers. It kind of makes me wonder what else has been going on that he hasn't told me about.

We have to be really careful what we say around him nowadays, because he has amazing hearing and will instantly repeat whatever we say. He's also picked up a lot of our phrases, and it's pretty funny hearing them come out of his little mouth. The other day, he told me that he wanted to change his pants, which had been falling down all day, because they "aren't stable." This morning, Tom was tickling him, and Jack kept saying, "You're cracking me up!"

He's been really into identifying emotions lately. If he does something that makes me unhappy and I pull a sad face, he'll ask me, "What's that, Mommy? What's that?"

"It's a sad face, Jack," I'll tell him. "Mommy's sad."

And he'll keep asking, "What's that? What's that?" I think the first time he did it, he was able to tease me out of my bad mood and get me to smile, and so he always does it now. And it usually works. Then he'll say, "Are you happy?"

He also likes to articulate his own emotions. He'll be throwing a tantrum or crying about something, and he'll wail, "I'm crying!" as if we didn't already know. Or he'll say, "I'm not very happy about that!"

One thing he's been saying to try to get out of doing things we ask him to do is, "I can't, because I'm scared." Even if it's something like sit in the chair or eat one more bite of waffle.

"I'm scared of that chair!"

Yeah, right.

Sentences often begin with the word "because," for no apparent reason. It's like he's preparing to argue with us, even though we haven't said anything.

"Because I don't want to have my diaper changed."

"Because I don't want Daddy to go to work all the time."

"Because I just want some orange juice."

As with most developmental milestones, we are finding this latest one to have both its pluses and its minuses. But overall, it's pretty fun and funny to hear the things he comes up with. It's like having a glimpse into his little mind.