Button, Button, Who's Got the Button?

It's been SO cool to hear Jonah begin to talk. He struggles at times to get his ideas across, but he points to help illustrate his point (or pushes on your legs until you move to do what he wants) and he chatters quite a bit. Right now, he pretty consistently says Dadda, Mamma, shoe, sock, ball, book, light ("lie"), eye, head, bye-bye, hi (hello), more, chair, spoon, car, choo-choo (for train), cheese, bath, bird, moon, sun, up, off, on, outside, uh-oh, hat, elbow, button, and more that I am sure I'm forgetting right now. 

At times, he gets stuck on a word for a couple of days; right now he is fascinated with the word button. Everything he sees that looks like it might be something you can push is a button (e.g. circles drawn on his sippy cup), and he notices all of the buttons on toys and even in picture books (such as the rocket ship one he received at cousin Grant's birthday party).  It is so clear and sounds so adult at times that it is just striking.  It hadn't occurred to me until last night that he might not be aware of another meaning of button, as a fastener.  We were sitting at the dinner table and he was going on about buttons, so I was able to capture this cute video:

We still use some sign language, and that's been an interesting adventure as well.  He has started using the sign for bath to mean both bath and please, so you have to use context to figure out what he might be talking about.  Usually, that's not a problem in the case of these two words.  At this point, I think I need to continue to build my own sign vocabulary some more to help him build his. It's a matter of finding the time and the right teaching opportunities.

We've also had our first instance of Jonah using a word incorrectly. He likes the word elbow and will say it again and again at times. If you ask him where his elbow is, he always grabs his wrist. I have a feeling we helped create this confusion, as we likely held his wrist while we used our other hand to point to or touch his elbow. The poor little guy didn't recognize that the point was in touching his elbow and not his wrist, so now he thinks that his wrist is his elbow! We're trying to correct that by showing him our own elbows and touching his without having to touch his wrist, but we have yet to make inroads.  Hopefully we can get some video of this too at some point in the near future.

He's starting to be able to match animal sounds with animals, though he's not too great at vocalizing the sounds himself.  Ask him what a lion says and he has that one down.  He can definitely say "meow," and "quack" (or a variation thereof) comes out at times.

He clearly understands much more than he communicates.  We can give him instructions involving multiple steps and he does pretty well in following them (e.g. go get the book and bring it to mommy, put the car in the back of the dump truck and push it around), and he knows and gets excited by certain phrases, such as, let's put on our coats so we can go outside, or let's wash our hands and get ready for dinner.

I wonder what he will learn and speak next?  He loves to look at books (current favorites are The Very Hungry Caterpillar, which we sometimes read up to 10 times a day, Raffi's The Wheels on the Bus, and the My First Superman Book) so who knows which words he'll pick up next.  I continue to be amazed at all he has learned in such a short time!