These photos are from a while ago - we had two foster boys at our home for a weekend. They were standing looking out the window, intrigued by something in the yard, transfixed. The third boy is cropped out of the photo because his face was looking at the camera, and we aren't supposed to share their faces online until/unless they get adopted by a foster family.
Jax has been speaking in loose sentences for some time now. He is often missing certain connecting words such as "the", "if", "when," etc. but most necessary action verbs, nouns, and many adjectives are present.
We have this game with his outdoor play set where he dumps a bucket of ping pong balls down the slide. He used to toss them one by one, but it became more efficient for him to dump them all at once. I wait at the bottom of the slide to gather up the balls and return them to him at the top of the slide. (He clearly has the better end of the deal!). When it was too difficult for me to gather all the balls in my hands, I one day asked for the bucket. That started something new, and now our slide game goes something like this (narration courtesy of Jax):
"Here come balls!" "Here come bucket!" "Here comes Jax!"
Jax likes to experiment with his voice. It could be volume, repetition, unusual sounds, or new words. Lately he also likes to sing. I crack up anytime he sings, because his lyrics range from phrases of Christian songs we sing to him, to names of people he knows, to pretty much anything on his mind.
Benjamin's parents live in Florida. We visited them at Christmas and had a great time. Jax periodically talks about our trip and the family we visited. That's how he learned the word, "Florida." He says it pretty clearly.
One of the songs I sing to him at bedtime begins like this, "Change my heart, oh God...." It's an old Keith Green song that was popular among Christian churches when I was a kid, and my parents sang it to me when I was little. Christian music has become more complex in recent years, so many of the tunes I sing Jax are simple ones from my own childhood.
So this is how we arrived at him singing loudly and with great expression,
"Change my heart Florida!"
Today in the car he sang this hysterical ditty, (again please imagine this sung with great volume and expression, many drawn out syllables),
"Peek a booooo!!!
"Peek a booobeeee!!!
(Spoken): "Say booby."
(This word is not used in our home, even in private, so I have no clue if he heard it somewhere, or was just extrapolating syllables from the original word "boo.").
This is promptly followed by,
"Jeeeee-suuuussss!"
"Jesus loves me!!!"
"Oh-beeee-dient!"
"Halleluuuujah!"
"Jesus hallelujah!!!"
A good piece of parenting advice I once heard is that if you try to take credit for teaching your kids the good stuff they come up with, you're going to have to take credit for the bad too. Especially when we are talking about a toddler singing, "Jesus", "hallelujah", and "booby", in the same breath, I'm going to have to stick with not taking credit for any of it.
