Letters

Once Jerald had successfully taught Seth how to count to 10, he moved onto letters. Recently, I have been realizing how many he knows. He points to a letter, says the letter, then says a favorite word the letter starts with. Some good examples...

M - Mom
D - Dad
N - Nana
G - Gra
P - Pa
S - Seth

First Snow

Last night it snowed in Boston. Not too bad - but enough for Seth and I to stay in for most of the day. Seth's word of the day was "snow." Every time he passed the window - he would point and say "snow!"

Living with a Foreign Exchange Student

Who is this foreign exchange student, you might ask? His name is Seth. In recent weeks, Seth has gone through a language explosion. He is constantly talking. He likes to identify things and people. He repeats words he hears or things he wants. It is all really fun and exciting. The problem happens when we don't know what he is saying. Sometimes he has just made up his own word for something, but has neglected to tell us. Other times he is pronouncing something in a way we cannot identify it. So the game becomes, trying to figure out what he is saying.

The other day, Seth turns to me and says "gablablapa." Or something like that. I, not know quite what that means, say, "garbage?" Seth looks directly at me and very slowly says, "No, gablablapa." He said it so slowly and with such care, it almost seemed he was thinking "No, stupid, I didn't say garbage I said gablablapa. How can you not know what that means!" Hence, I feel like we are living with a foreign exchange student and we are constantly working on creating a common language.

Body Parts

After looking at Xander's blog - we thought we would share all of the body parts Seth points to when asked...

1. head
2. eyes
3. nose
4. ears
5. mouth
6. tongue
7. teeth
8. hair
9. knees
10.feet
11.toes
12. arm
13. bellybutton
14. and the all important - penis

Communication

Seth has been doing an amazing job at communicating his wants, likes and dislikes and desires to us. He utilizes various methods to achieve his desired ends.

1. Baby Sign Language ~ he has been using signs for a while now. He very regularly uses "more," "milk," "all done," and "book." The "more" sign is so cute - in the beginning we would always laugh and give him what he wanted. He now uses it constantly so we can control ourselves a little better.

2. Other Movements ~ recently he started shaking his head "yes" and "no." As this is very new - Jerald and I still laugh when he does this. We will try to get it on video soon.

3. Words ~ I think I am going to disable the list of words on the right hand side because it is not an exhaustive list anymore. I am not sure I even know all of his words. His latest addition is "up" which is very useful when he wants to be picked up.

"What does ba mean?"

Seth has been a chatterbox recently. He has a bunch of words that we can identify - Mom, Dad, Ball, Bubbles, Bye Bye, and Balloon. But then he has a bunch of other things that he says with some regularity that we still have not figured out what he is referring to.

Today he started saying "ba" over and over again. When asked the very important question: "What does ba mean?" Seth's reply is always the same: "Ba."