Words of the Week

Hopper's language skills have taken on new highs in the last couple of months. Nearly every day we are blessed to hear him experiment with new words and phrases. Some of which are quite surprising and others directly from our own mouths.

Gone are the days of baby talk and missing articles and prepositions. It's full on paragraphs with adjectives and adverbs and all of the reflexive pronouns. It's astonishing how quickly kids learn, imagine if that scale never ebbed and we were all just walking encyclopediae?

This week his favorite new word, blurted out of the blue, is figurehead... Wha?! He found a yellow bike light, a small LED encased in a rubbery yellow loop that wraps around the handlebars. He announced to me during a play session "Here comes the figurehead mama!" At the end of the day, after hearing him happily belting it out at least 50 times, I started asking him where he heard it and he knew exactly. Thank you Octonauts cartoon.

Sunday, on the bike ride home from dinner with friends, we were all 3 talking about our days. I was talking about my Pilates course and asking him if he had fun with daddy. His reply, oh nevermind. 

He's also totally gotten a handle on otherwise and instead and although he hasn't quite mastered the meanings of yesterday and tommorow (when talking about something last week he says yesterday which is somehow freakin cute), he totally has a well of memories he likes to recall and is starting to grasp the days of the week.

One of his favorite things to talk about in the last months is meteorites and he'll ask me if in fact it's a comet instead. He enjoys space talk and loves photos of anything to do with space. Just before Christmas, he had pepernoten cookies in his hand. They're small round brown half spheres. He put 2 together to make a ball, and said, "Mama, look, this is the earth and the earth is our planet and it floats in space." He announced it to me, a statement without any query, as if he had no doubt but was sheerly by way of information. He got super smooched for that one.

I've been kicking myself for not writing down all the lovely things he's said over the last year or so. I was pretty good about it in the beginning but totally lost steam. So I've decided that i will try to just blog it from time to time if not just to have a record of it to look back on...

Sorry no photos, I have about 7 months of photos on my camera and no space on my hard drive. Something that has taken 8th seat in the list of priorities at this moment. But I promise sometime soon, I will get to it.

New Photos

Few weeks ago I did a little session with a good friend to spice up the ole portfolio. I couldn't be happier... Thanks David!

Photos copyright David Cohen de Lara

Hopper's 1st Overnight Guest

Ok funny and awkward story. I try to speak as much Dutch as possible but often my conversations with Hopper's teachers are peppered with English. It was no different a few weeks ago when picking him up, teacher Judith starts going on in Dutch about someone coming to sleep over for the weekend. (Mind you school lets out on Thursday, who in the hell is staying at my house for 4 days?!?!) My brain is scrambling to understand just who exactly is coming over without any warning and I start to panic as she mentions "he" will need his swim trunks to join us at the beach! (I've only packed lunch for us 3!) Resorting to flustered English, I was so relieved to hear that it was Puk, the school's plush doll mascot and learning totem. Effen Whew! My brain was all prickly. I'm sure the alarm was written all over my face. And in my relief, hearing about the sweet Puk ritual for the first time, I started to giggle. And cry. Just a little. Sweet tears of mixed emotions.

So Puk came over with his own little suitcase including PJs, toothbrush and paste, comb, change of clothes, manual flashlight and bedtime story. (The point is to take responsibility of him, a Montessori Tamagotchi if you will.) And of course the addition of swim trunks and sunglasses so he could spend the afternoon in the sand with Hopper Mama and Daddy at Zandvoort!

We love the beach! And even went swimming. (No not Puk, though we joked about burying him the sand for a photo op then decided we all have enough sand brought into our houses by little feet and it wouldn't be fair to the next kid's parents for their inanimate guest to splash out sand onto their *wink* clean floor.) We walked, played soccer, found hermit crabs and jellyfish, and played on the slide and bouncy castle. It was a gorgeous day, the last proper beach day of the year, and we soaked up every last minute of it, staying late to have dinner at a beach cafe, toes in the sand.

Oh, and for the rest of the weekend, Puk joined us for meals and some tossing around the house and at the end of the 4 days, we made an entry into his "travel log" with photos and some lovely words for the next kids to read. Hopper got to show-n-tell about it at school and all the kids loved the pic of Puk hangin' cool on the beach blanket. Such a lovely thing to do for the kids.