You got time to duck?

Kiernan can quack now. Sort of. Let me just say he can kind of quack, but he can definitely growl. No question about that.

He's got two little board books from Discovery Toys that he really likes. They are called Boomering Books, and they are bound so they flip up vertically with a rattle attached to the binding and a piece of cloth with a link on the end. The link on the end clips onto stuff, like a stroller or a shopping cart or a space shuttle, making it easy to take the book anywhere. They are very simple books. One is entitled "Baby Faces" and it just has...um...baby faces in it. A picture of one face on each page and a caption describing what the baby is up to. Thinking baby. Curious baby. Laughing baby. Embezzling baby. The other one has a picture of an animal on each page. Kiernan loves these books. He will make me read them to him again and again. Given that there is only one word on each page, however, I have to help out the narrative a bit. While I read the animal book, I make animal noises to correspond with each page. This is not as easy as you may think, as there is a whale, a dolphin, a zebra and a giraffe in this book. I have no idea what noise a giraffe makes, so on that page I just say, "The giraffe goes, 'Hi...I'm a giraffe!'"

Today Wendy came in while I was reading this book to Kiernan and said, "If he ever goes to Africa, he's gonna be really confused."

His favorite animal sound from that book is a tie between the gorilla and the sea lion.

At any rate, on the tiger page I just do a jungle cat kind of a growl. Wendy and I both do this same growl whenever we see him playing with his little stuffed tiger, a fellow who shares his crib named Justin. Justin was a gift from one of Wendy's education colleagues; this gentleman's son--who, in a stunning coincidence, is also named Justin--had to undergo heart surgery as a child. His family sent us the little stuffed tiger before Kiernan's operation so he would have a comfort animal during recovery. They sent a tiger, in particular, because their son had taken a tiger with him when he was in the hospital. Accompanying the stuffed tiger for Kiernan was a cute picture of the human child Justin in a tiger suit.

The other day Wendy was growling with Justin (the stuffed animal one) while playing with Kiernan in his room. Kiernan growled back. Ever since then he has been able to growl when we do, and very often will growl if we just hold the tiger up and ask, "What does a tiger do?" A couple days later he also picked up the ability to growl at the picture of the tiger. Now, he has seen many more dogs than tigers in his daily comings and goings. And for goodness sakes, he lives with a cat. We tell him incessantly that puppies say "woof" and the kitty goes "meow". Heck, the kitty herself tells him that all the time, often when he is napping (did I mention that I used to be a cat person eleven months ago?). So his first animal noise, as anybody would expect, is a tiger noise.

Which I love.

I'm a huge fan of the jungle cat population. The fact that my son is starting off speaking their language, without having to be raised by apes--or some weird jungle bear--is kind of nice. And please, no jokes about the father's simian heritage.

Oh yeah, I think I opened this with a statement about quacking. Kiernan has indeed quacked, although he is far less likely to do so on command. In fact, I've only heard it a couple of times. But it was there. The same night Wendy got him to growl on cue, she also got him to do a sort of quacking noise. There's a picture of a duck in the board book, and when she said that a duck goes "quack quack," Kiernan responded with something like, "kak kak." It wasn't a perfect mimic, but it was definitely in the ballpark. There was intention there. And a fairly good ear. Later when Wendy got him to do a very vague approximation of a meow, he very clearly switched to a higher pitch from his tiger growl to do so. The boy's got skills.

So there you have it, more minutiae than you could have ever hoped for. I bet you can't wait for my post about his first book report. I know I can't.

I already know how I'm gonna start it.

"This post is about..."