Baff? (by dave)
This little thing struck me several times this evening, so it’s worth sharing.
For the past couple weeks, Caden has been repeating, “baff,” when we tell him it’s bathtime. Taking a bath is part of his usual going to bed routine, and he likes it. But tonight, we didn’t give Caden a bath — it was a long day, he was exhausted, and we’re doing a little training to make sure things go smoothly when grandma and grandpa have to put him to bed next weekend.
As I was reading books to him tonight, several times he looked me in the eye and said, “Baff.” I don’t think he has the vocal control to turn a word into a question by using intonation, but it sure seemed like he was asking me a question.
My first reaction was of course, that it’s completely adorable for my son to ask me whether he’ll be having a bath tonight. In thinking about it later though, it’s pretty amazing what’s going on in that brain to bring together the predictability of past events with this new ability to name activities (not just things) and to ask Daddy, “what’s going on?”
It’s not as if this is completely unexpected and new, these abilities with language and pattern recognition have been building up steadily. But still, it’s little moments of realization like this that are really special.