Knock, knock...

Who's there?

A kid who's learned to tell the first part of a knock-knock joke, that's who.

I don't think he knows it's a joke yet, though.

The kids are both just blowing me away these days with their newfound language skills. For a lot of things, we only have to say a word once and they can repeat it back, even days later.

Case in point: Nump! Nump!

That, by the way, turned into the first official sentence - he ran up to Daddy, held up his arms, and said, "Nump me! Nump me!"

They can both point to most of their body parts if you ask, although we have some confusion regarding ears and eyes. See, they picked up early on that people answer the phone by saying "Hi!" - except they heard and repeated it as "Eye!" and would go around picking up anything vaguely electronic or remotely shaped like a phone, or just their hand, hold it up to their ear, and say, "Eye!"

They've got "fingers," "hand," and "mouth"
down pretty well, though...

So you can understand the confusion when we started telling them that the part they were doing that with is called an "ear," and that there's another part called "eye," which is close to the ear, but isn't the ear. But you still say "Hi" when you answer the phone.

Their imaginations are just going a mile a minute, and I have so much fun watching them play pretend and find new uses for old toys.

They come up with incredibly creative ways to use their newfound language and to communicate in other ways, too. "Bye-bye" was an early acquisition, but recently they've started using it not just to say goodbye when someone leaves, but to indicate that they want to "go bye-bye" from wherever we are. They use it as a question if we're in the playroom and they want to go in the kitchen or back yard, they use it if we're at someone's house and they want to know if we're going to be leaving or if someone else might be, they use it to ask where we're going if they see me start to get the diaper bag together.

They're also learning quickly how to be gentle and play with dogs. Our older dog, Sadie, got sick very suddenly last week (or at least, it seemed more sudden to us than it was - the vet said she hid it very well) and we had to make the awful choice to let her go. Our younger dog Miles hasn't been quite sure what to do with himself without her around, but he and the kids are learning to play together and be gentle with each other. 

We're also dog-sitting a sweet girl with a very different personality from Sadie, and she's very sweet with the kids, which is giving Miles and the kids a different model of how to interact than they're all used to. She actually sits patiently and waits for the kids to approach, and brings them toys to throw, and doesn't run away when they come running, and they seem to be really enjoying this different way to treat a dog. I think Miles has always been inclined to be friendlier with the kids, and now he's seeing a model of how it works. It seems like the dog-sitting came along at a really good time as we're all figuring out how to deal with the Sadie-shaped hole in our family.

It is a pretty big hole, though.