From the mouth of Jenson: 23 months

(the following intro is a repeat, but the post is new)

When Jenson really started talking, he was constantly cracking us up with things he would say, or surprising us with his verbal skillz.  I bought a wall calendar that had blank lines on the top page, and the calendar at the bottom and hung it in the kitchen, so that we could record milestones or funny things that happened through the months so we wouldn’t forget.  I included some of the stuff in Jenson’s monthly updates, but I thought I’d backtrack to add these notes to the blog, especially since I don’t do monthly updates for him after he turned two.

I didn’t write down as many for September – must have just been busy with a trip home, trip to Vegas, and a weekend visit from his cousins – but his language just kept getting bigger and bigger.

September 2015 (things in parenthesis are our responses to what he says)

• “Get more letters?” referring to his magnetic letters (us: yes, go get more letters) “Be back!” (us: okay, come back) “Wait here” (us: okay, we’ll wait).  Over and over, for each letter, or crayon, or coloring page.  It’s a great way to kill 15 minutes.  If you don’t repeat his commands back to him, he keeps repeating “more letters, more letters, MORE LETTERS!!!”  You can’t just say yes.
• Rockababy? He was obsessed with the Rock-a-bye song at bedtime.  He especially liked it when we sung about animals “rockabye kitty, doggy, elephant, etc).  He would tell us which animal to say for each verse.
• (what do you want to eat?) “Applesauce!”  every time, every meal
• Names the colors of everything “blue cup” “red ball”, etc.  He struggles with gray and brown, but so does Lo, ha ha.
• “Songs?” when he wants to listen to the toddler station on Pandora, and “bus?” when he wants to listen to the toddler cd in the kitchen (the first song is Wheels on the Bus).  He knows the order of most of the songs on the cd and will start to sing before the next one starts.

• “I cook” when he wants to stand on his cooking stand in the kitchen.  He mostly just wants to stand up there and eat snacks, but whatever.
• “Videos?”  He loves watching videos of himself on our phones.  We’re raising a generation of narcissists with these smartphones!  We limit how long he watches them, but he’s seen them all enough that he’ll talk along with certain videos.

• “Max, share”  We visited my sister and family in Vegas and Max is 4 months younger than Jenson, so neither boy is great with sharing, so we were always telling them both to share (this trip, and when they were home in the summer).  Jenson isn’t used to anyone trying to take things he’s playing with, so when Max would have something that Jenson wanted, he would say “Max, share”.  He seemed to think that meant Max should just give him whatever he was playing with.  He would say it very sadly and look at us, like – aren’t you going to make him?  They did really well playing together this time though.
• We went to the Shark Reef Aquarium in Vegas and he was naming everything we saw.  I was impressed, he knew them in books, but I wasn’t sure he’d know what a starfish and jellyfish were in real life since they are much more blobby looking that in books.