Kid talking anecdotes

Sorry my dudes. I didn't enjoy you all that much when you were infants. I mean you were all wiggly and stuff. It was nice when you fell asleep on me, but the baby phase just wasn't really my favourite.

Hillary loved that phase. The cuddles, the closeness, the helplessness, all of that. She was good at it.

My favourite phase of bringing you two up thus far has definitely been the 'learning to talk' phase. Your growing understanding of the sounds we were making. Trying to get out those similar sounds. In hindsight, I already wish I had recorded more videos of our little conversations, but I do have several. Enough to give the right feeling to it all.

There are a couple of anecdotes from these phases that were really special to both Hillary and I. For posterity then.

Isaac: Cookies

As kids do, when they start talking, they only have a few syllables. One of the first 'words' that we truly recognized was Isaac's word for cookie. If we had those for second course, he'd excitedly proclaim, "Degah degah!"

Of note, you needed all four syllables, otherwise it meant something else. Degah degah was cookie. Not cookie cookie. You also had to say it really fast.

Paige: Practicing

We had put the kids to bed and were downstairs. Isaac was out cold and I heard Paige talking softly upstairs. I wasn't even sure she was awake at first. "Is that Paige?" I asked Hillary.

"I don't hear anything."

I listened and quietly headed upstairs. I don't remember the word, but it was polysyllabic and something that had come up earlier that day. It might actually have been remember as I seem to recall it being an 'r' word. That would be ironic, right? I get confused.

Anyway.

Paige was lying in bed quietly saying the word over and over. Clearly trying to get it right.

"Mememembre. Remebmer. Remememember. Rebember. Rebebber," and so on. I quietly went downstairs and told Hillary what she was doing. Hillary headed up and listened outside her door as well. Eventually Paige either drifted off to sleep or felt she got close enough to the right pronunciation that she was satisfied.

Isaac: Water

"Isaac, say water."

"Wa wa"

"Can you say 'wa'?"

"Wa"

"Can you say 'ter'?"

"Ter"

"Wa"

"Wa"

"Ter"

"Ter"

"Wa...Ter"

"Wa...Ter"

"Wa ter"

"Wa ter"

"Water"

"Wa wa"