Alphabet Soup

Boo-Boo Head has been babbling up a storm, saying a lot of "Da, de, ba, bo cah da da." and the like, particularly when he's waking up in the morning and I free him from the confines of his crib. He particularly likes to run into our bedroom and hang on the edge of the bed and wake up Daddy with this stream of conscious dialogue. I like to think he's telling his father about his dreams and chiding Phil to get out of bed, man, we got playing to do, that sort of thing. He also does this hypercute thing where he tosses one of four very squishy, baby-friendly balls and yells his version of "Bonsai!", which sounds like "Atchow!" As a matter of fact, every thing he throws gets that verbal send-off. I am dying to know what it means, but that is neither here nor there. He's also 50/50 on getting the balls to go forward; usually, he throws and the balls fly behind him. I can't wait to catch him doing it on tape, just so I can break out the footage on prom night, wedding day, and any number of milestone events. I am just going to be the nightmare mamma. Getting back on track ... lately, and I mean in the last day or two, I've been noticing some real words seeping through. Like today, when I picked him up and carried him down the hall and asked him: "Would you like to eat breakfast now?", and he responded "Eat." Cool. And after his bath tonight, when he went up for the hundreth time to pat the watercolor Phil and I got last weekend at an auction - it's of Sesame Street's Count Von Count on top of a castle with three little kittens who need to find their mittens - and I said: "Yeah, that's the Count and the cats," and he pointed to the Count and said: "Cat." We'll work on semantics later.