Boot boy

Following Wednesday's puddle incident, R went into the Clarks shop in Evesham while he was out for a walk on Friday, and bought a pair of toddler wellies. When Baby B was introduced to them yesterday, he found them quite interesting (though rather less entertaining than the box, naturally), but after trying them on for size he insisted on them being removed and put away.

This morning we explained to the Boy Wonder that if he wanted to go out and play in the garden, he would need his boots on to keep his feet dry, because the grass was wet. Being a tiny genius, he immediately grasped this argument, weighed up the options of wearing weird things on his feet or staying in the house, and accepted the wellies.

I wish I'd thought to take a video of him when he first went outside in them, because he was taking huge strides with his feet spread wide apart, like a cartoon depiction of a giant, which was very funny. Because of the way his baggy trousers sat on the tops of the boots, he also put me quite strongly in mind of a pirate - especially when he was marching about wielding a long bubble wand.

While he was helping us to collect windfall apples, and admiring the various invertebrates that we found on them, B produced the word "appul" for the first time. Sometimes it was "appul" and sometimes it was "pappul", and sometimes it stretched even further and became "apappul". When they heard this later in the day, L and G weren't convinced that he hadn't been saying "airpore" - which of course is where airpays live - but R and I are both quite sure that The Boy knows the difference between an airpore and a pappul. It is certainly true though that he's now discovering that some words sound quite a lot like other words, and that the sounds he's already learned to make can therefore be turned to different uses. For example, over the past couple of days he's spotted that if he says "peas" with an interrogative inflection, it also works very nicely for "please", and gets him lots of praise (and maybe even cake, if he's lucky).