Quite honestly, I am amazed at what is going on in Leo’s head. I think he had proven that his comprehension surpasses his speaking ability today.

He adds words to his vocabulary rather slowly, but does a pretty good job at retaining what he knows. As he uses them more and more, they can get a little bit abstract. This has been the case with “ball” also meaning “round”, or a “dot”, and also with “up” meaning “comfort” (maybe…. he says “up” when he wants to go down as well.)

Most of the words he has learned have been in English, because they are single-syllable, and have sounds that he is capable of making. Thanks to Grandma Fujita, he recently learned the Japanese word for “flower” – “hana”. He says it whenever he spots real or fake flowers, which is pretty cool. Today I felt like the cast of The Wizard of Oz because I was blown away so many times – the first being him saying “hana” and then the Japanese word for grandma, “baba”. Wow. So, his mind is connecting the balls.

I typically use English around him except when I am reading him his Japanese books, so he’s heard me say “flower” a number of times now. It appears in his “word book” (a picture book of 100 words), and I point them out when I carry him around the neighborhood. Well, I took him outside to look at the flowers and he said his “hana…..baba”, and I bought him inside to tell Yuki about it. I explained, in English, that he said flower and grandma. Then the little dude, who was quiet up until that point, says “hana”.

Whoa. Hold the phone. I stood there staring at Yuki just in awe at what had just happened. The little dude has never said “flower”, but knew the meaning, and was able to show he knew what we were talking about by using the sounds available to him. Amazing.

I did my best to test the situation, and asked him “what’s that?”, pointing to a hat. As mentioned in previous posts, he looooooves hats, so he responded with “hat”. I got him to say a few other words that he knew, then asked him to say “flower”. He said “hana” again. Ho-lee-shit. He managed to demonstrate that he knew what we were talking about, but is limiting himself based on the sounds. I know I am repeating myself, but I want to drive that point home.

Also, he did his best to say the baby way of “dog” in Japanese; “wahn wahn”. It came out as squeaks, but he was able to do the same squeaks several times when I asked him what he was looking at.