Big Red Rock Eater

This past summer, I lamented to anyone who would listen that one of the things I dreaded most about Leo starting Kindergarten was that he was my buddy who chatted with me all day long; once he was off to school, who would fill the silence of my days?

I should have known all along how Pax-filled my days would be.

One year ago, as he neared his 2nd birthday, Pax had approximately 20 words and signs - his expressive language was more like a one year old than a two year old.  We started speech therapy in November, and progress was slow.  Hoping but not expecting to see a huge change when he had tubes placed in his ears in February, we only observed how much more he noticed in the noisy world around him.  Those months were long, and frustrating, and largely quiet.

In June, after making a giant leap in expressive speech, we were happy to realize that Pax was using nearly 200 words or so.  Two months later, his expressive vocabulary grew to include nearly 400 words.  He began to string together multiple words to form sentences and mimicked multisyllabic words like "emulsifier" (thanks to his beer brewing daddy, of course.)

And then this weekend, even more emerged in his speech: the jokester, the comedian, the funny guy who finally has enough language to deliver the punch lines to his most adoring fans.

What is big and red and eats rocks?