I’ll give away the ending of the Sam at 22 Months post – he still loves dinosaurs. He really loves dinosaurs. He loves the dinosaur exhibit at the Children’s Museum, he loves to carry around his toy dinosaurs, he loves to wear dinosaur clothes – he’s a bit obsessed. They are his thing and we all know it.
Of course Sam also loves animals, namely cats, dogs and elephants. He points them out in all of the books, on TV shows, and if we see cats and dogs when we’re out and about. Interestingly though he doesn’t really like the elephants at the zoo. In fact they scare him and we usually have to leave the exhibit quickly, or stand as far back from the elephants as we possibly can with Sammy clinging to me desperately while still staying within sight distance of Clare to keep her from jumping the fence to try to get in the exhibit.
Sammy’s latest developments include more complex sentences. He’s started to string together 3 and 4 word statements like “Mama all done shower” and “more cheese please.” He speaks paragraphs and soliloquies (and, as Grandma described it, with “punctuation, capitalization, and exclamation points”) but we only understand a portion of it. He, however, understands just about all of what is said around him. I gave a brief quote from The Tigger Movie at the dinner table one day, and the kids had seen the movie the day before, and Sammy got very excited and started talking about “tigger! bounce! pooh! bounce! bounce!” If I mention the apple tree or some plant in the back yard Sam perks up and starts yelling “outside! Backyard! Go outside!”
Other words that he says over and over:
“No!” – No means no, No means yes, No means maybe… and anything else. It’s his default answer to every question.
“Uh-Huh” and “mmm-Hmmmm” – He doesn’t say yes, yep, or OK.
“Sammy turn!” – This usually means Let me do it/Give it here/Stop helping me and let me be independent already!
He’s started identifying the quantity of two. I gave him two pieces of toast one day and he looked at them and said “two toasts!” It came as a shock to me that he knew what “two” meant. He doesn’t understand other quantities but he will recite his numbers – he’s particularly fond of “fo five six!”
