Vocabulary

Benton is becoming quite the chatterbox. We're consistently amazed by how much he's talking now and how many new words he learns every week. It's also fun to try and decipher some of the things he says for the first time. Sometimes the best we can do is just smile and nod.

On weekday mornings, I wake Benton up at 6:15 AM to get him dressed and in the car for the drive to school with his dad. Usually he's not actually awake the whole time I'm changing his diaper and putting on his clothes. I've been keeping a running list of the things he talks about first thing in the morning. Mostly he says "mama" or "blanket" or just names another nearby item, but it really makes me laugh when it's something random. The kid must have pretty lucid dreams. Probably from all the books he hoards in his bed and "reads" while he should be sleeping.

Here are some highlights from this week's early morning conversation topics:

• basketball
• lion (complete with a hearty roar)
• apple juice
• monkeys
• pants
• banana soup (this is from one of his favorite books, Floating Bananas)

What also makes me laugh are the half-hearted sentences he's trying to put together. We're not quite to subject-verb agreement or anything like that, but nice attempts at more than one word at a time are still impressive to me. Here's a quick recent example.

When Benton went with his Granny C to visit family in Alabama a couple of weekends ago, he came home with tattoos (Thanks, Uncle Bo!). One on his neck, like Daddy, and one on his stomach. He loved lifting up his shirt to show off his "TAT-too" (He puts the accent on the wrong syllable--it's cute when you're a toddler). Anyway, about a week and a half later, we finally scrubbed the last of the tattoo off in the bath. While I scrubbed, Benton kept saying, "Bye-bye, tattoo. I love you."

I can't believe we're less than a month away from a birthday. It doesn't seem real that he's turning two.