Eighteen Months Old!

Can you believe it? I'm now 18 months old. I keep trying to tell Mom I'm no longer a baby. Every kid I see who is under the age of four I point at and yell, "Baby!" See, Mom, THEY'RE the baby, not me!

MaMa and DaDa sure are able to understand me a lot better. They say my vocabulary is exploding. That sounds messy, and I guess I am still pretty messy, especially when I'm eating. Yesterday I went to the Oxford Baby Lab. I've been there once before when I was about a year old. They are really nice. I get to play with some toys and climb on the furniture. Last time I got a T-shirt and this time a water bottle. After I played for a bit, they showed me a bunch of pictures, two at a time, on a really big screen. I sat on MaMa's lap, but she had to close her eyes and wear headphones that played jazzy music. Meanwhile, I got to look at pictures of things like a dog and a car, while a voice said, "Oh, look, a car!" [They videotape the child to see where their eyes go to check their comprehension of what has been said.] Sometimes they didn't say the word quite right, like saying "Bick" instead of "Book." It was kind of like playing a game. I would get really excited and yell out the word ("Car!!") after the voice said it, and point at the picture. After we were all done, they let MaMa watch some of the pictures I had seen and then some of the video of me watching the pictures. They said that I was one of the most advanced they had seen in the number of words I could say and how much I understood. They weren't used to babies my age talking a lot when they visited their lab. I talked more than just about any baby my age. Well, MaMa and DaDa could have told them that! I hope that doesn't mess up their research too much!

One word I learned recently is "shadow." I say "Sha-Sha!" whenever I see that dark outline on the sidewalk or elsewhere. It's so fun to spot and to try to wave at it. Yesterday MaMa took me to the window to look out into the garden in the morning. She says, "This is the day the Lord has made; we will rejoice and be glad in it!" Then she thanks Jesus for the day, and we spend some time looking at the weather in the sky, and the huge sycamore trees and any birds we might see. Yesterday, though, I could see myself and MaMa in the window! And so I yelled, "Sha-Sha!" There were our "shadows" in the window. It took MaMa a while to understand. Then she laughed and told me I was very clever. That kind of shadow, she said, was called a reflection. But now I see them everywhere--especially at night when we haven't closed the curtains yet. All sorts of things have "shadows" in the windows then. But these shadows have more color in them than the other shadows.