Mimicry

Lately, it seems that the Monkey has been a bit keener to imitate us.   We can now get him to make a greater range of sounds than his favourite "dah!" simply by making the noises at him.  We say "beebee!" and he does his best.  We say "maamaa" and so does he.  It's interesting at this point to see that while he can confidently point to a whole bunch of pictures, and while he can imitate a limited set of sounds, he doesn't yet have the idea of bringing these two concepts together and actually using the different sounds to identify different objects.

I think this is probably almost as frustrating for him as it is for me, as he stands pointing up at the bookcase.  "Dah!", he says.  I look up.  "You want a book?"  I pull one out and hand it to him. "Nanana!" he says, waving his hand impatiently, then points again. "Dah!", a little more insistently.  "The ribbons?".  Again, I'm rejected with "Na"s and more hand waving.  Several "Dah"s later, and he's almost on the verge of tears, before I finally realise (through a process of elimination) that it was the crayons he was after all long.  I suspect he thinks I'm being purposefully obtuse - and as much as I'd rather not have crayon decorations all over the walls, I promise that this doesn't factor into my lack of Monkey language understanding.

Anyway - we have put his new found penchant for mimicry to a good purpose at meal times.  He's not too fussy an eater, for which I'm thankful, but he's much keener to eat food he sees us putting away.  The other night, Hubs was picking up broccoli florets, and biting the heads off the trees, so to speak.  The Monkey watched this procedure for a little while before reaching out to our plates and whining to have his own broccoli tree to play with.  So we obliged.

Well, I think in the end there were little bits of broccoli all through everything, but he did seem very pleased with his destruction of the foliage, and that's all that matters, right?