Stephenisms, Part Two

Stephen is talking so much more lately, and he has started imitating what we say. For example, I never realized how often I say, "Alright." For example, when we're all ready to go and I've made sure we have everything, I survey the scene and say, "Alright!" and now, when I say that, Stephen says, "Awight!"

Another word he's been saying a lot of is "ready." We taught him to ask "Ready?" before he throws a ball for someone to catch (because otherwise we were all getting a lot of balls thrown in our faces), but now he's started saying it at other times. Whenever he knows we're going somewhere, he wants to immediately put his shoes on. Once his shoes are on, he says, "Wawwy!"

He is trying to learn his colors, and he knows most of them, but still gets them mixed up. So sometimes I'll pick up a blue crayon, and he'll say emphatically, "Bwow." He loves the color green, and he always knows when something is green, but sometimes other colors are green as well. "Stephen, what color is our car?" (red) "Gweeeeeeeeeeee!"

The biggest language development is that he has actually started saying some animal names, where up to this point he was only saying the sound the animal makes. At the zoo last week, he said goat, cow, llama and, my favorite, ostrich, which he pronounced "osschurch." The other night we were looking at a book and Christian pointed to a picture of a horse, which he had previously called "aaaa-aaa-aaaaah" (like a horse neighing). He asked Stephen what it was, and he said, "horse!" clear as day.

His favorite things right now are his Chuggington trains (of which he knows the names of pretty much every single one, even trains that we don't have or that he's never seen on an episode of teh show) and the letters of the alphabet. He can point out any letter you ask him, he can say the phonetic sound of all 26 letters (although he sometimes mixes up N and M), and if he sees a letter anywhere he almost always makes its sound. It's really fun to watch him recognize letters, for example, on his placemat. His placemat has a barnyard scene on it, and all around the border there are words like "neigh," "moo," and "baa." Well, at lunch today he was going, "ssss, qwa, uh, eh, ah, kk," sounding out the letters in the word, "squeak!" I don't think that means he's about to start reading, nor do I care if he reads "early." But as long as he's interested in letters, that's what we've been spending our free time doing. Once he gets tired of them, we'll move on to something else. But I hope he never gets tired of reading!