Chatty Cathy over here...

Noah has been sprinting in the speech department. Here I thought I was along for a nice jog, but instead I am left in the dust wheezing. I also thought I knew all about this "language explosion" that was supposed to occur. I figured he would start to say words and then he would start repeating things and then gradually he would be a fluent speaker of the English language. I never realized that this somehow happens over the course of a few months, not years!!! I wrote not that long ago about all of the vocabulary words Noah has been coming out with lately. We've moved on now. He is rapidly adding in 2 word phrases to the mix now. Just last week he came out with "fire truck" (ire guck in Noahese), "school bus," and "apple juice." And just when I thought this was scary enough on the drive back from Maine this afternoon, the child spoke a full sentence at me. Granted, he was mad at me at the time, but HELLO, a full sentence!!

The back story on the anger issues he was having begins back when we got the new car. It is new, and shiny, and more importantly to Noah, has LOT of buttons (BUTTIS). We have let him sit in the driver's seat and play with the buttis and he has had great fun there. He often asks to go out for a ride, and then when we get to the car, he asks to play with the buttis. He is a man on a mission, and a persistent little man at that. Long story short, it had been a while since he had gotten his grubby mitts on the buttis and he wanted a go at it, only it was time to pack up and drive back home after the weekend visiting family. He didn't get to play with the buttis and was instead placed in the back seat in his car seat, far away from the buttis. He spent the next hour and half in the car letting me know exactly how distraught he was about not getting to play with the buttis, he whined, and he threw his hands up in despair, and covered his eyes from the continued trauma of not being able to play with the buttis. My goodness, you'd swear the child lived in a third world country and was being denied food for the 10th day in a row. I spent the ride attempting to ignore the whining and carrying on and tried a number of distractionary strategies. I pointed out the trucks and motorcycles for him to look at, we listened to his music, then we tried my music, then we tried validating his distress with not being able to press the buttis. I tried rationalizing with the little man, all to no avail. Finally, I told him that he just simply couldn't play with the buttons right now because this was Mommy's car, and Mommy had a job to pay for it, and Mommy was in the middle of driving it right now, so these are not Noah's button, they are Mommy's buttons. He had had enough, and in an extreme attempt to convey his feelings, he looked up at me through the rear-view mirror and said in a little voice as clear as day..."NO MOMMY, MY BUTTIS!" Well, I guess he told me!