I’ve just realised that I never wrote about Ben’s latest tricks! He’s into animal noises at the moment, and is really good at matching animals names and pictures to the noises they make. Ok, he doesn’t always get them right, and you do sometimes need a little bit of imagination to distinguish between them, but he does them very sweetly.
“Ben, what noise does a snake make?”
“ssss”
“What noise does…. a dog make?”
“ooof”
“What noise does…. a crocodile make?”
“nap nap” (accompanied by a hand opening and closing like a mouth)
“What noise does a cat make?”
“eee-oooo-UUUU”
“and what does does an owl make?”
“ooo-ee oo-ooo”
“what noise does…. a cow make?”
“mmmmmmmmmm” (occasionally “mmmooooo”)
“What noise does a monkey make?”
“oo oo” (accompanied by bouncing up and down)
“What noise does a lion make?”
“RRRRAAAAAA” (with big grin – his first noise and still his favourite)
“What noise does a sheep make?”
“baaaaaaa”
I think that’s all the ones he knows at the moment. We’re trying to teach him to say “please” and “thankyou”, and the former seems to come out as “more” at the moment 🙂
Anyway, I tried to get him to be able to say the word “thankyou” by assking him what noise a Thankyou Monster made, but I got told off for doing that. <g>
He’s definitly getting more words though – he obviously does “mumumumum” and “dadadad” (which I think also means A and me, rather than “generic big person” which it did before), but also “door”, “water” and one or two others. Not that I’m a proud dad or anything. 🙂
The sheep noise also reminds me of my last holiday as a bachelor, that I went on with a very good friend of mine. It was a Christian holiday in Turkey, run by Mastersun, and quite family oriented so they have a creche type arrangement for little people. One of the things they do in the creche is to sing memory verses like you do in Sunday School, and we made friends with the young lady who was running said creche. She was telling us that there was this one little boy or girl (can’t remember which now), who couldn’t really get the hang of the songs, but liked to join in where he could. There was this one song in particular, that starts “Your the Sheep (baaa) Jesus said (baaa) …. ” and so on, where everyone can join in the “baaa”s even if the other words were too hard. Course this little lad just loved this, and would build up all his energy and shout “BAAA” at the top of his voice when that bit came along. 🙂 So of course, we all started walking around going “BAAA” randomly to each other, especially as a response to teasing or wind-ups. “The only thing I can say to that is BAAA”. Maybe you had to be there. 🙂