Sam : Daaaaaaaaaaa (waves hands wildly)

Sam has been running around under his own steam for a week or two now, and he has gone on to the next thing : getting to understand speech.

It’s actually incredible how young childs get to learn new words. For weeks or months you keep repeating the same thing to them, pointing things out to them, it doesn’t make sense to them at all.
By accidently repeating what you are doing they find that you will suddenly make happy or interesting noises, and they will repeat those gestures or sounds so you will make them again.

And then suddenly, they ‘get’ it. A sound is associated to an internal image, to a sensation, and they remember it.

Sam is still not very clear as to what ‘papa’ means, but he knows it’s a person. He refers to everybody as ‘papa’. I’m hoping to refine this to the actual daddy 🙂
His soother he calls his ‘dodo’, and when somebody goes into another room and closes the door behind them, he goes to bang on the door with his little fists and plaintively calls ‘tooooo ? tooooo ?’.

And sometimes, but not always, he waves when we go away, long wild waves of his hands that go just about anywhere and are accompanied by a very loud ‘daaaaaaaaaaa’.

Yesterday he got baptised in our local church. He found the experience interesting, wandering around  the front of the dais, except for the water part…Afterwards we had a big bbq for our family and friends, about 2O people (we bought waaaaay to much meat !) and had set up a tent for the children to play under. All in all a happy afternoon for everybody. Exhausting though, preparing before and cleaning up afterwards…