Alden is developing his vocabulary, and it is so nice for us. Yesterday when I was taking off his pants, he said, “Papi took off!” We’ve been waiting for a long time for him to start stringing words together. He’s going to love communicating better.

The day before, he called “Eden” by her right name by himself for the first time. When he learned to talk, he called her “Hen.” Even though he has been able to pronounce all those letters for a long time, he had stuck to his original nickname.

One of his enunciation issues is with the “tr” sound. When he tries to say a word like “truck” he pronounces it with an “F”. It doesn’t sound very polite.

Alden is starting to say some more words. We’re the only ones that can understand him. Elisa does a better job that I do. He says “glayk-glek” for blanket. He says “booh” for boot/shoe. He still says “nak” for snack and “peez” for please. For a long time he has loved saying “bohk” for broken. He says “Hah” before he takes me by the hand and leads me somewhere. He can make dog and cat noises. I guess his best enunciation is with “water,” because he can even pronounce the ending “r.” My favorite is when he says “Wa! Des!” It means “watch this” and he does it right before doing some jumping somersaulting trick.

Eden occasionally likes to make up nonsense words. She tells us, “Did you know that gleedis means toy?” (I don’t remember if that was actually what she said gleedis meant). Yesterday she made up a word that meant that you were so cold that your nose falls off. At dinner when Elisa quizzed her on some Spanish and sign language vocabulary, Eden answered with a nonsense guess most of the time.

Last Saturday we bought Eden a new (used) pedal bike. It’s got a decal of Disney princesses on the chain guard. One of her favorite things about it is the bell. She can hardly learn to ride because she is jingling the bell constantly. Just during the last two weeks she got good enough at balancing on her kick bike that we think she’s ready to start riding the big-girl bike.