Duh, Mom.

For a while there, I could keep up with him. His new little tricks. Pointing. Clapping. Signing for milk. Now, I can’t keep up. I’ll be explaining something to him and he looks at me like, “Duh! I’ve known how to say drum for ages! I was just keeping it under my hat.” Wink, wink.
There are too many words and sounds to count now. Just when I’m marveling over his clear pronunciation of “Bus! Bus!” as he runs giggling and screaming towards me away from the noisy toy school bus he loves to turn on and run from, I open the coat closet and he says, “Coat.” Coat?! Where did that come from? Duh, Mom. Coat is almost always followed by, “Pop-pop.” Why? I’m not sure. Is it because Pop-pop hangs his coat up in the coat closet when he comes over or because we put on our coats to go see Pop-pop? Don’t know. But “coat” and “Pop-pop” are a natural pair.

More exciting than the actual sounds he’s making and words he’s saying, is just how much he understands. When we climbed the stairs for nap time yesterday, he ran straight down the hallway to his room and began barking orders. First, he opened his dresser drawer where the paci is kept. Then, he pointed to the CD player where the lullabies are played. Then, he marched right over to his crib, pulled down his blankie, pointed to his Winnie-the-Pooh doll and said, “Pooh.” If he were a tad taller, I’m quite certain he could’ve read himself a few pages of Goodnight, Moon, turned on his fan and tucked himself in.

All of a sudden, he’s like, “What’s up, Mom? What do you want to know? Ask me anything. Anything you want. Where’s my nose? Right here in the middle of my face. Where’s my belly button? Right here. Smack in the middle of my belly. Oh, and just south of that is my penis. Got that one too. What else you wanna know? Toes. Got it. Hair. Got that too. No question’s too difficult. Shoot.”

I’m so amazed at how skilled he is at our little rounds of Baby Jeopardy that I actually had a dream last night that he rearranged the furniture in his room all by himself and then sat down to the piano and began plunking out a little Mozart, just, you know, because he’d heard it and liked it and decided to play it.

I may be getting a little ahead of myself. He still chucks his banana across the room, stands on the forbidden armchair and calls me Dah-dah, so we have a bit of work to do before I sign him up for the gifted program. But, nevertheless, he astonishes me daily. I’m on the edge of my seat waiting to find out what he’s going to show me today. Maybe with a little twinkle in his eye, he’ll call out, “Mommy!” from his high chair, followed by, “Oh, come on, Mom. I knew you weren’t Dah-dah all along. I was just messin’ with ya.”