of apple trees and other miracles

Easton has undergone a language explosion in the past month.  In a two-week span of time he literally went from caveman grunts to full sentences.  His comprehension has always been good, but his entire vocabulary was under 40 words, many of which were names.  He lacked a lot of the basics, like "ball," "truck," "please" and even "Easton."  About 3 weeks ago he started picking up new words every 10 minutes or so.  Literally.  Very quickly he was stringing them into sentences, complete with prepositional phrases, proper verb tense, and good enunciation.  Amazing.  We've had the sheer delight of hearing what is going on in his little mind and heart. 

His favorite prepositional phrase is "at the beach," and he says it in a low and serious voice. Lots of things in his world happen "at the beach": "I like pumpkin pie at the beach!" We did go to the beach in October, but I assure you there was no pumpkin pie. I'm not sure how the association got made, but I suspect it was simply the delight of making the sentence even longer.


Yesterday we stepped into church, where beautiful Christmas trees were decorated with red and silver balls.  "Mom, look!" Easton exclaimed. "An apple tree!"  He was mesmerized.  And yes, it did look an awful lot like the apple trees in his favorite book (never mind that it was a different species of tree).

This afternoon we were baking Christmas cookies and he kept asking in his adorable little voice: "Mom, can I please have a little, tiny bit of dough to eat?"  It was very, very hard to say no, but when I did he would ask, with an irresistible sparkle in his eyes, "Mom, can I have it a little later?"  I must say that such a precious miracle as this called for a bit more cookie dough than usual.