I think the most exciting thing about August these days is his language. He's talking, talking, talking. He's building complex sentences, reasoning, ordering us around, and picking up new words all the time. We noticed a huge language explosion - in which his sentences became more complex, he started working with prounouns (instead of always calling himself August, he started to say "I" and "me" and calling me "you" instead of Mama) - about ten days into our summer. Maybe it was just that time for him developmentally, but I have a theory that it was precisely because he was out of school, where the primary language is Swedish, that he was able to start listening to, learning, and repeating more complex English sentences. Either way, he's talking all the time.
His favorite verb is "need". As in, "I need chocolate", "I need to watch a movie", "I need my bozer (bulldozer)". He likes to tell us who went somewhere or did something - "I got on an airplane, Dai-dai got on an airplane, Mama got on an airplane, Papa got on an airplane!" He calls James papa, like his Swedish schoolmates do, instead of baba, and it sometimes morphs into bapa.
He counts one, two, six, seven in English, but in Swedish he gets it right. He can count backwards from ten to one in English with no problem (I count down to him every night at bedtime). Just in the past few days he's started to spend time really studying books, looking at everything in the pictures and telling us about them. His favorite books now are the Dr. Seuss classics and the books about a boy by Oliver Jeffers.
When I sing he often says, "Stop it! Stop hurting my ears Mama!" When he doesn't want us to go somewhere or do something he waves his hands and says, "Locked you in the gate, Mama." He wants me to "eat my worms and think they're icky", which means to munch on his toes and act like they're gross (not a big stretch).
He loves to build. He uses his Legos and magnetic Tegu blocks to make masterpieces - big castles, cars, bridges, towers. He loves to scoop things: "Coming to scoop you!" He loves to give hugs, saying "hugging you!" "Watch me roar you in the big bedroom Mama!", and then he roars and I jump up and run into the big bedroom.
He seems to feel very conflicted about Leif still. Sometimes he's sweet and caring and delights in making Dai-dai laugh; other times, it's all pushes and shoves and bodyslams.
This summer we've had a fun time hunting for snails and slugs and picking wild blueberries (as the pictures attest) and now wild raspberries. When we go to the beach, he'll find a stick and throw it in the water and run in after it, throwing it a tiny but farther each time. One of the beaches we visit has a rope swing, and that seems to be his absolute favorite thing, swinging to and fro.
There are a million little things I'm forgetting, and I'll try to update this post as I remember, to have it all in one place.
He's our cheeky little monkey, and he's such a joy.
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