Our Little Boy is All Grown Up

Andrew is no longer a baby boy. He is entirely and undoubtedly a little boy. While the change has been subtle and slow, it has become truly apparent very quickly. (As if to reaffirm my thoughts, Mollie just walked in and said, “You’re turning into such a big boy, Andrew.”)

When Andrew began talking, we kept a list of all the words he said. By December 15th of 2008, he had mastered the use of uh-oh, bye-bye, mom, daddy and ball. We semi-religiously kept our historical tome for the next five months. Over that time, we recorded forty five new words, signs and animal noises. After that, there was such an explosion of new words, it was too difficult to keep up. But at that time, they were just words used in solitary expressions. In the last month-plus, he has become a dictionary of words with an encyclopedic zeal for using them together (words of an exaggerating daddy? I think so!). While still piecewise in their construction, I can have an entire conversation with Andrew on any number of different topics; colors, animals, Steve Martin and John Candy (wait, I meant to say planes, trains and automobiles).

Andrew had another first yesterday. He sang a song. Like his conversations, the song was choppy, lacking some of the cohesion one would expect in musical verse. However, the essentials were there; the melody and (some of) the words. It went something like this:

Twinkle star
How I wonr star
Up aov star
Like a diamond sky
Twinkle star

We quickly learned that the general concept of the song is not fully engrained in his mind, as he once sang:

Twinkle dog
How I wonr dog
Up aov dog
Like a diamond dog

All of this progression continues to remind me how lucky we are to be witnessing his growth and development. I had been told how much fun a child of this age is, but I was unable to see beyond how fun my infant boy was. But ‘they’ were right. This is fun!

The best part? It is only beginning. He still has so much to learn, so many different ways to grow. And as he continues on his journey, another child is just taking her first steps towards an amazing life; and I get to watch!