Yes, appar­ently one or both Jason and I say “oofta.” Yes, we also live in North Dakota, so it prob­a­bly hap­pens more than we ever real­ize. This fact was ham­mered home to us the other night at sup­per when Jason said, “oofta” after A had a cough­ing spell. K looked at him and said, “Asa poopy?” So appar­ently, we not only use the word oofta, but we use it as an exple­tive when chang­ing a smelly diaper.

More and more over the past few weeks, we’ve been hear­ing K repeat things that we have said to him. One night, Jason was giv­ing him two choices for get­ting his dia­per changed. K kept telling Jason that he didn’t want to have his (poopy) dia­per changed. He wanted to wear it. (On a side note, you can tell we’re not exactly steam­ing down the road of potty learn­ing . ) Jason told him, “That’s not a choice.” Later that night dur­ing the bed­time rou­tine, K and Jason were talk­ing and at one point, K said to Jason, “No, Daddy, that not a choice.”

Last week, we spent a lit­tle time with my mother-in-law and father-in-law. One of the days, my nieces (ages 6 and 4 were over). At one point, I heard them argu­ing, and the six year old was say­ing, “That’s fair!” to her sis­ter over whether or not she needed to share some toys with her. Fast for­ward to this morn­ing. I was show­ing K the new library books we had checked out for this week. He was pretty excited about them, and he kept pulling them out of the bag and say­ing, “That very fair!”

Then, there are the things he picks up that I’m not sure where they came from. “You know bet­ter, Mommy!” “A, you being bad!” “No, no, no, no, no!” These are not things we say to him. I know that now that his peers are speak­ing more and we are around more and dif­fer­ent peo­ple, his pool of expe­ri­ences to draw from also grows.

He’s at an age where he is such a sponge. He doesn’t have pre­con­ceived ideas of what is fun or not fun (video games vs. books) or what music is good or not good (pop music vs. opera). He loves so many dif­fer­ent things. I think that his new ten­dency to repeat things that we say at just the right time is good for us in more than one way. While it reminds me that he’s always lis­ten­ing to what we say, it also reminds me that he is pick­ing stuff up All. The. Time. I am rais­ing a lit­tle sponge, and I want him to be able to absorb all that he can before this time ends.