Some words about words (and some other stuff).

Parker is about to be 15 months old. It's really hard for me to believe this, yet I know it to be true: Sadie was 15 months and a week when Parker was born. At that point she was stringing two or three words together to communicate her needs. Looking back, she seemed so much older than little Parker does now, and unfortunately we treated her as if she was much older than she actually was. I have a tremendous amount of Mommy guilt over rushing her out of baby-hood and into toddler-hood in preparation for a new baby to join our family. And unfortunately, I think I'm repeating that mistake by rushing her into the land of being a "big girl". This morning after yet another pair of soaked underwear and pants, she looked into my frustrated face and said, "but mommy I'm NOT a big girl." "Oh yeah, " I replied, "than what are you?" "I'm just a toddler." (Said with perfect adult-quality diction and clarity.) She's a toddler all right, but a really darn smart toddler.

In contrast, I'm eking out every last bit of baby Parker before toddler Parker takes over. Thankfully, he doesn't seem to want to move forward too quickly into this next phase of his life either. We tried a few weeks ago to start weaning him from his bottle, replacing his pre-nap "ba-ba" with a sippy cup full of milk. His reaction to this was to repeatedly push it away and shake his adorable oversized head no. Preferring to have him sleep than to have him weaned, we caved and returned to the "ba-ba" once again.

While Sadie was virtually composing poetry at 15 months, Parker's words are few and mostly unintelligible for everyone except me. I had compiled a list of words Sadie said clearly before she was 1, but it seems to have gotten lost in our move. I vaguely remember that list being close to 50 or possibly even more. She had some pretty hysterical sayings too, like "baygies and keem cheeps," for bagels and cream cheese. Parker's list is considerably shorter. And he uses A LOT of homonyms. For example, for a while "da-da" could mean Andrew or the ever-important giraffe we've mentioned in previous posts. Now he only uses it to refer to the giraffe, having replaced Andrew's moniker for "Dot". "Chee" can mean cheese, or teeth. For the most part though the little guy just wanders around the flat (or anywhere else we happen to be) in search of phones or other devices with buttons, saying "boom? boom?", or "butza? butza?" Perhaps it's a bit too early to tell, but I predict he's not likely to be a great orator. Computer programmer in a call center, maybe?