The Stay at Home Mom Chronicles : Our Secret Language

I'm realizing that my days around here seem to run together.
Ordinary moments unfold around me daily
and I need to stop and relish in them.
One day, my boys will be out living life
and I will miss these everyday experiences.

So, I am taking the time to document
the simple moments that pass between us.
I'm calling this little collection of memories...

My almost two year old son has his own language. Most of the words that he speaks in this language are actual English words that he associates with an action that is occurring at the moment that he learns a new word. For example, the other evening as we ate dessert, we were all being classy and dipping our fingers into a bucket of Cool Whip. This was a huge sensory moment for him because Cool Whip is delicious. I happened to have a headache as we ate and said to my husband "I've got to shake this headache." Koen looked at me with the most sincere face and said "More headache?" while pointing to the Cool Whip. He now calls Cool Whip "headache" and refuses to call it anything else.

He is also obsessed with the vacuum cleaner and often insists that we turn it on. He approaches it like a caveman by smacking it and grunting in a desperate plea for it to make the wonderful loud noise that it does. So, Roger told him recently that the vacuum needs power to work...Koen now calls the vacuum "power" and that's just the way it is.
It has also become glaringly obvious that my husband vacuums more than
I do because Koen has taken it a step further and
calls our beloved Dirt Devil "dada's power".
That's fine with me, dada can have it.

Other words in his language are an attempt to
inject syllables into what he is trying to say.
It's as if he has an awareness that the word is broken up into different parts
but he just can't quite grasp how to pull it off.
Sometimes, he gets super creative in his attempt.

He calls raisins "wha wha what ways",
it took us about three weeks to figure that one out.
Bananas are "dupah dupah dow",
and if something is broken his says that it is "burp gun".
(I think that one is my favorite)
His little toy toolbox full of plastic tools is "tubba tubba hammer."
It took us almost a month to decipher that one.

I just love how his little mind works
as he tries so hard to make sense of the world around him.
I know that day will come
when he will use the word broken instead of burp gun.
That the wha wha what ways of the world will just be plain ol' raisins,
dupah dupah dows will simply be bananas,
and the tubba tubba hammer will collect dust on the shelf.

Until then, I will treasure our secret language.