A mind of his own

When we had Jack we aspired to teach him rudimentary American Sign Language so that we could avoid some of the youthful tantrums that come from a child not being able to make himself understood. The thing is, we have hardly ever had any trouble understanding him. Before he had words, he had body language. If, on occasion, you couldn't wrap your head around that, the list of stuff he might want when he complained was short enough that it didn't take long to try all your options. Sign language quickly fell by the wayside because we just didn't ever seem to need it.

Nowadays Jack is just full of words. It's harder to think of what is not in his vocabulary than what is in it. We will grant that he can't give a lecture in rocket science, but he can pretty aptly express anything that he feels is worth discussion. (It occurs to me now that he doesn't ever describe himself has 'happy', 'sad', 'mad', etc. He's more inclined to say that he 'likes', 'loves', or 'doesn't like' X.)

More than anything, Jack's a little observer. If he were a grownup, I guess some would say he has an incredibly annoying gift for stating the obvious. But you don't really get sick of hearing a toddler make sense of his world (unless said toddler is trying to dodge nap time). Approximately 85 percent of his observations involve vehicles. Our best rudimentary measure of how much his vocabulary is growing is how elaborate his descriptions of vehicles are getting.

Even though Jack is a fairly verbally precocious little boy, some of my favorite things that he says are a little off. I love the way the he says zero ('zebo'), and every morning he asks for a 'vitaminit peas' (vitamin please).

And then there are the things he says which make grammatical sense, but which have a comically limited context...for instance the 'I don't eat bubbles. Bubbles taste baaaad' mantra we have. This is what we say in the bath every other night. We parents say it in a manner that we hope conveys the soundness of our advice. He says it in a mischievous, gleamy-eyed manner that suggests, 'I'm 12 nano-seconds from stuffing my mouth full of these bubbles, and I think you should be delighted.'