Barney song

This evening when I was singing Joshua his lullaby he was busy saying something... Couldn't figure it out at first, but then I realised that he was whispering "Happy know clap hands" and then clapping a couple times, and then doing it again and again... We've got a Barney CD which Josh loves to listen to in the car, and invariably when he asks he says "Barney happy", and he definitely wants "If you're happy and you know it". I guess it's not surprising that he's starting to sing it on his own now...

While I'm commenting on his talking it bears mentioning where he is right now...

He can now say basically all of your colours - red, orange, yellow, green, blue, pink, purple, brown, black, white and grey. And his favourite colours are definitely orange and red, in that order. Whenever he's drawing with crayons he wants the orange crayon, and we must use the red one. He loves his orange truck best, and if he's choosing clothes he'll always go for the orange and red if they're in his cupboard. Anything orange just makes him really happy apparently!

He also know the basic shapes - circle, square, triangle, star and heart. I haven't really tried to teach him rectangle yet...

And he can now pretty much count to 5, although it's sometimes 1 2 3 4 5 4 5. He also knows that the other numbers to 10 are numbers, because if you ask him to count he'll sometimes say something like 8 9 or something like that. But he doesn't know the order yet.

A couple months ago he was able to say the names of all of my family who are still at home, but in his own way - Ganny, Gamma, O-no, Ninny and Rich. But they have now improved quite a bit. It's still Ganny and Rich, but now Gampa, A-new and Cindy. So that's come quite a long way. He also knows some of the names of my family who don't live together. A few weeks ago he was in the bathroom at my parents house and seeing the 3 toothbrushes there decided they belonged to Cindy, Richard and Colleen. He hadn't seen Colleen in ages, but he knew she belonged as part of the family.

Over December and January we had my uncle Ron and my cousin Shawn staying in our new study. Shawn then went home to Australia, but Joshua will still periodically mention him, especially when we're in the room where they slept. And with Uncle Ron and Pamela now being in the process of moving to Cape Town we've been seeing them every few weeks, and they are a collective "Ron-Pam". Even if he just sees Pamela, who he's seen much less of, he'll say "Ron-Pam".

And he also knows his Fish Hoek cousins names. He'll often just randomly start talking about Ammer, Paige and Sawah (Amber, Paige and Sarah), and even sometimes Frankie, the dog.

And when I fetch him from his day mother in the afternoon while we're driving down the street he'll be saying, "Bye Wenny (Wendy), bye Bella (Isabella), bye Connor, bye Chase". It's so cute to hear the way that he says all these different names!

And of course his pronunciation still has a long way to go. When he says "orange" it comes out as one syllable, and "blue", "black" and "balloon" (which is more like "bloon") he over-enunciates the "bl-" sound, so his tongue is working really hard. It's just too cute! I try every now and again to take a video of him saying the colours or people's name etc to try and capture this stage, but whenever I start recording he stops saying things nicely. So I'll post it if I ever manage, but I'm not sure it will happen...

It really is a joy to hear him speaking more and more, and very often we're actually able to have a conversation with him now! Exciting development!