Thursday, July 19, 2007

hooded towels, Spanish songs, ice cubes, and wooden horses

[posted by bkmarcus]
Wednesday night I gave Benjamin his bath and then handed him to Nathalie so she could wrap him in a towel. This is the reverse of how we've been doing things recently, so Benjamin ended up getting wrapped differently than he's used to, with more towel-hood than usual draped down over his face. I carried him like that, hooded and hidden, to his changing table, where he suddenly pulled the towel off his head and said, "Boo!"

This was one of those moments that melts a parent's heart, which is hard to communicate to anyone who hasn't spent the last year toweling off a baby and playing endless games of peekaboo. It's always one of us, maman or papa, who says boo; and then Benjamin laughs. So this was the second reversal of the evening: Benjamin kept saying boo and it was his parents who laughed and laughed.

Under Benjamin's vocabulary list, I keep a smaller list:
exclamations
  1. yay! (when clapping)
  2. aye! (French for "ouch!" … said in imitation of his mother)
  3. boom! (when he falls down)
  4. boo! (said when peeking out from beneath a towel)
Oh, and I should mention that while "aye!" isn't new, he's now using it to sing along with the song "Cielito Lindo":
De la sierra morena
Viene bajando viene bajando
Un par de ojitos negros
Cielito lindo de contrabando

Ay ay ay ay
Canta y no llores
Porque cantando se alegran
Cieltio lindo los corazones
Benjamin's rapidly growing vocabulary seems to develop in phonetic clusters, first words that begin with B, then words that begin with P, and now we're onto F-words, including, unfortunately, the boy's pronunciation of "truck." Benjamin's previous new word was fleurs (flowers), which he's been repeating whenever we're outside. Now his new word is froid (cold), said mostly about ice cubes or papa's ice cube-filled carafe. We experimented with other frozen items this afternoon, touching his hand to bags of frozen veggies, etc. to see if he'd identify as froid something that wasn't an ice cube. No such luck. So maybe he thinks froid means ice.

Here's a picture of Benjamin's first ride on a merry-go-round:


(Thanks to Kayla and Miss Angel!)
- papa

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