cross-reference

Matthew is big into reading these days. Well reading may be a bit of an overstatement; he is big into looking at books these days. We have a number of books that are just pictures of things, and he is thrilled by them. He points out things, names things, describes things, assigns ownership to things, changes ownership of things, comments on the cleanliness of the things, the relative size of the thing and sometimes the colour. Of course all this is within the confines of his ever expanding, yet still quite limited vocabulary. A standard discussion will go like this: we'll take a car as an example.
"Cah!"
[Aside: He has, for some reason, picked up a bit of a boston accent. I am not sure where this comes from, and it doesn't apply to everything, but some some cars in particular are defiantly Boston cars, as in "Coah" instead of the regular "cah". For this illustration we will assume a non-boston car.]
"Cah! Cah! Ye-yo Cah! Daddy Cah! Big Cah! Mommy Cah! Dirdy Cah!"
Most things will go through a similar evolution, like Boat:
"Bo! Big Bo! Daddy Bo! Mommy Bo! MommyDaddy Bo! Ye-yo Bo"

The colour thing is new and developing. He has 2 currently, so things are all pretty much black and white, or in this case, blue and yellow. He gets a bit confused when we tell him that the colour is wrong and will earnestly either switch to the other colour or reiterate the colour that he has chosen. Like-a so:
M: "Bu Cah"
A: "Matthew, that car is green, Green Car.""
M: "ye-yo Cah"
A: "No Matthew, Green. Green Car, this one is yellow, this one is blue, but this one is green"
M: "ye-yo Cah"
Still, colour is cool.

So, back to his books of things. He has many, some that are abstract, some cartoonie, and some with actual pictures. We were reading one the other night and he pointed out Kite, or "Kye". Then he stopped and grabbed for one of his other books and started frantically flipping pages. I had no idea what he was doing since he usually comments on pretty much every page. He flipped through several pages until he finally stopped and pointed triumphantly at picture on the page: "Kye!, Kye!". Sure enough it was another picture of a kite. He wiped that book away and pointed back at the original: "Kye!", then back and the new book: "Kye!". Yep that's my little boy: making daddy proud by cross-referencing is picture books.