Animals

Greyson loves animals. It started with dogs and cats. Those were some of his first words, although they started out as "do..." and "laaa" (his word for cat... he has used it consistently for months!). We visit lots of dogs and cats around our neighborhood. Every morning when he wakes up and joins us in our bed for a few minutes, he asks for the dog and cat (Aunt Linda gave us books about Dewey the library cat, and stories about bad dogs for Christmas). He takes his books and looks at the covers and pictures of his beloved animals before finally rousing us out of bed for the day. His pronunciation of cat has advanced recently and now sounds a bit like... well, "liaou" or "leeee-aaah-ooow." Dog still sounds about the same, as Greyson is great at the beginnings of words but not so good with follow-through. More on that later...

Recently the Goose has added the animal's sounds to his repertoire. We can ask what the doggie says and are treated to a little "arf arf!" - or he will echo it right back to the dogs on our evening walk. Kitties say "liao" - very similar to their name but said in a sweet cute little baby animal voice. Pigs say "chhhh chhhh" (insert clearing throat noises), cows say "mmmmmmmmmmmm" and I think he was trying to say "neigh" last night as we walked past a neighbor's house and saw a decorative iron horse on their planter.

Lately we've noticed that Grey is trying to add the endings to some of his words - the K or T sounds at the end of hat, brick, crocks are a little tough for him. It comes out really cute, like his favorite shoes, crocs are cwah-kuh's. Hot is sometimes haaah-kuh. Brick is biiih-kuh. That word ending takes a lot of effort!

The cutest things are when he is learning to apply his new labels to the world. We saw a few snakes on our trip to visit Grandpops and Jo last weekend. He loved the word "nay" or "nake" and decided that was the appropriate word for the worms in our driveway too! Or he takes "moooo" which is the moose stuffed animal in our room and applies that to the photo of Winston that we keep on the fridge. Winston the dog wearing his Christmas antlers! So even though he's not stringing multiple words together, we're pretty proud of how Greyson is using his words.