"Her Name?"

Matthew is one inquisitive kiddo. He asks a lot of questions and is constantly on a mission to try and figure out how things work. I refer to him a lot as an 'observer' because if he isn't asking how things work, he will just watch you make it work and figure it out on his own. He has been obsessed for a long time with these Disney Storytale Books we have that contain about twenty-five different Disney stories in them. He calls them his 'Biggie Books'. We have three of these books and he can sit for about thirty minutes at a time and flip pages and look at the pictures. For a long time, he would bring the books to me and point to a picture because he wanted to know what a certain character's name was. I would answer, "Aladdin, Ariel, Tinkerbell" and he would listen to me tell him their name and go back to reading the book. Within a few days, Matthew started coming back to me and asking, "Name?" and I would go through the same process. This 'process' became tedious and I would tell Matthew, "Go ask Claire what her name is." Sure enough he would go ask his sister for the information he needed. Soon, Matthew's curiosity carried over to things outside of the book. He would bring me one of Claire's dolls and ask, "Her name?" He moved from dolls and characters to household items. What is hilarious is that he would bring me a fork and say, "Her name?" This little naming game has now turned into the way he asks for the name of anything. My Mom and sister had to laugh when he started saying it to them because it sounds so funny to see Matthew holding a Lego and then hear him say, "Her name?" If Matthew brings something to me and I don't know the name, he will always respond "I ask Rawr (Claire) her name."

I love when kids say things the incorrect way. I love the little hitches in their speech and don't want to correct them because it is so cute! Michael used to call Claire 'Hi' when she was a baby because we used to tell him, "Say hi to your sister" and he just thought that her name was 'Hi'. Damien still wishes he calls her 'Hi'. Claire was the queen of misnaming things and saying things in the cutest way. We used to call her mush mouth because you could barely decipher one word from the next. For some reason, she used to call cheeseburgers 'cheese-yats'. I still don't get this one but it used to make me smile so big!! Matthew is pretty good with this communication skills. So far, he doesn't have a lot of mistakes in his speech and when he develops more of them, I won't want to fix them because we all know that by the time they are in Kindergarten- they pretty much have language all figured out. Now, I am not sure how Emily will do because she is my last baby and I am sure I will want to stretch her 'baby phase' out as long as I possibly can. I know that my sister Natalie, who was the baby girl of five girls, still said Burber King when she was in the fifth grade. Do I want it to go that far? Not so much. But I still will bask in my kids saying silly things wrong because it just reminds me that they are little kids. And kids grow up so fast. I need to figure out how to slow this aging process down!!!