He's also watching the dog

Cooper learns from what he sees. And he sees the dog doing a lot of things. Cooper has already tried to drink water from a puddle on top of an overturned canoe after watching Lucky do that, but today was even more impressive.

After throwing most of his lunch onto the floor in a fit of frustration, Cooper was demanding to get out the high chair. So, feeling defeated, I let Cooper out of the high chair and let Lucky in to clean up the macaroni elbows and cucumber slices blanketing our kitchen. Lucky, being a dog, started hoovering up the macaroni. Cooper, being a very funny kid, put some things together in his head for the first time ever- and got down on all fours, bent his head to the ground, and started sucking wet, dirty cucumber slices off the kitchen floor and eating them. There they were, together, cleaning up lunch. I have to admit that instead of making the two of them stop, I just laughed at them. At least I know Matt mopped pretty recently.

Cooper's vocabulary expanded in the last few days. His previous sum total of spoken words (Mama, Dada, Doggie, Water, and "That") now has nearly doubled. He's added Bird, Chicken, Kittie, Moon, Balloon, and "Mooo" (for his favorite picture of a cow). These words are not pronounced very well, so I could also rewrite them as Burr, Did-den, Did-eee, Ooon, Dah-ooon, and Mmmmm.

My favorite is Bird, because he says it with such certainty. He sees a sparrow and points to it, and declares "Burr!" in this soft, hushed, gentle way. It almost sounds like a cat purring. But he's sure of the bird, and so if you ask him what he sees, he'll repeat "Burr!" very surely, but quietly. I'm not sure how this became the right way to say Bird to him- I don't think that Matt and I sound quite hushed and reverent around birds, but maybe we do.