DIS-covery

Spud: "Dis?"
Me: "That's a rock, Benjamin."
Spud: "Dis?"
Me: "A rock."
[Pause]
Spud: "Dis?"
Me: "Rock."
[Pause]
Spud: "Dis?"

In the parlance of our times, when you get dissed, you get disrespected. Benjamin is always dissing us, but he means no disrespect. "Dis?" ("This?") is his tool for learning the names of the things he encounters. He is constantly pointing at things and dissing. Body parts, things he sees outside the car window, tiny particles of fuzz, things on the TV. "Dis?" "Dis?" "Dis?" He must say "dis", no shit, about 100 times a day. He now has a very extensive vocabulary, all because of his constant dissing. The fact that he pronounces nearly everything wrong once he learns it is not really important. We (usually) understand what he's saying.

We didn't ever really encourage this quest to know nomenclature; it is entirely his own desire to know what's up. We always answer when he asks what something is, so he always gets results. We can tell that he's really proud when he knows the names of things and that he can participate in the conversation a bit. He smiles and points and says, proudly: "Rock!" (Rock) or "Umbugga" (Umbrella) or "Huffwhy!" (Butterfly).

A Walk in the Park

Last weekend I took a short break from toiling on my NASA proposal and accompanied Claire and Benjamin to Reedy Creek Park near our house.



He swung on swings, slid on slides, and descended through the blue plastic tube. I wonder if this reminded him of his big descent into the world 17 months ago? Sort of the same thing, except Claire wasn't yelling and grimacing this time.

The part of “Blogger” will be played by Claire today

Since John is busy with his MDAP proposal, I thought I would do a “guest blog” to keep everyone up to date on the exciting Spud developments that happened in August. It was a busy month, with John off to Ireland and then to Idaho for some field work. Benjamin and I kept busy in his absence with a variety of activities: We read



We sampled some seasonal fruits



We tried on clothes



We tried out some new toys



Meanwhile, here are some of the sights that John was taking in:







Yeah… Anyway, while John was away, Grandma and Grandpa Grimm game to visit. We had a lot of fun mostly just hanging out together.





Daddy brought some cool presents back from Ireland:



After his travels, John celebrated his birthday at the end of the month, and Grandma and Grandpa Chadwick came down for the festivities.





John requested a red velvet cake for his birthday, so after one failed attempt at making a “healthy” red velvet cake (hint: beets were involved, and it was NOT red), I resorted to a box mix, which had more red dye in it than Cyndi Lauper’s hair (in the 80’s). The results:





Then it was back to work as another semester began. Benjamin is off to a good start – he’s picking up one or two new words every day. John and I thought about updating our list of words he knows, but we can’t keep up. He’s probably got at least a 25 to 30 word vocabulary by now, which is better than some of the undergraduates in John’s classes. His favorite new word is butterfly.



Some parting cuteness, just ‘cause:





And now back to our regularly scheduled Blogger!

Mom Song

Claire has a couple of years to memorize this song.