leaps and bounds

For the last month or so, Barak has been repeating, or trying to repeat, just about anything I try to get him to say, in English, Hungarian or Hebrew. If I say, "Can you say 'truck'?" he'll say, "chuck!" If I say, "Azt tudod mondoni hogy 'alma'?" he'll say, "awa!" He'll also say words he knows with a little prompting--for example, if I give him something hot to eat and say, "Be careful, it's hot!" he'll say "Hot!" and blow on it. If I ask him if he wants a banana, he'll say "nana!" And so on.

Today, though, for the first time, he said an appropriate word on his own. We went to get pizza at the pizza shop--something we do maybe every week or two. I put him in his high chair when the pizza was ready, then asked him to wait while I put the (hot) pizza on the table. I handed him his plate, started cutting, and heard him saying, meditatively, "Hot. Hot. Whooo!"

After we had our pizza, we went and ran a few of our usual errands: the fruit and vegetable shop (celery, carrots, potatoes, broccoli and cream cheese); the drugstore (diapers); the bakery (bread and bagels); and the kosher grocery (chicken, fish sticks, rolls, yogurt, pickles, cheese, tomato sauce, carrot juice and whatever else I don't remember). It's cold where we live and he's very bundled in the stroller, and by the last errand he had sort of had it. He wasn't fussing, exactly, but he was looking pretty bored. On our way out the door, I heard him say, hopefully, "Ohm? Ohm?" What, is he meditating? Then it hit me. "Do you want to go home?" "Yeah!"

And home we went.