Hot

The Little Man is learning words right and left. His most-used conversation starter is "S'Dat?", said in a very (calculatedly) cute, high-pitched voice. You would have to have a heart of stone not to answer. Even after the 810th time, you still answer, but the answers are fabricated for the sake of personal sanity. "That's the Rock of Gibralter son" "That's what Mommy would buy if she won the lottery".

He gets quite a bit of new word-fodder from S'Dat. Some of them he says and keeps, some of them he tries out and discards - he'll say one fairly clearly, like "dirty", then it will be abandoned for a few days in favor of the gobbeldy-gook which he seems to prefer. For some reason he'll pick up words oddly, like he calls one of our cats "Ca" (for cat) and the other one by his name, "Da-in" (Darwin). And, though we live in the non-accented speech center of the Midwest, he pronounces Hi like a Southern Belle, complete with high pitch and inflection on the "a" (and sometimes a small limp wave).

One of his favorite, and most useful, words that he has latched on to is hot, pronounced "Ha" - always very loudly. (for some reason pitch and volume matter to him in pronunciation, no idea why.) It astonishes me, but he actually uses it in various contexts - he'll stand across the room when I'm opening the oven screaming "Ha! Ha! Ha!" He'll also point at my morning coffee and yell "Ha!" Also, if the car is warm and his car seat is toasty, it's Ha as well. The one I really wasn't ready for, however, was when we were watching TV the other night, a scene with a big house fire came on. Of course my child is sitting there soaking up the rays of the screen, all of a sudden he points at it and yells "Ha! Ha!". NO idea how he put that together - 'tis a mystery. All I know, if he starts pointing at the honeys manning the hostess station at the next restaurant we go to and calls them "Ha!", someone's going down.