Soren has learned two new words this past week: "soos" (shoes) and "duht" (duck). These words serve a very different purpose from all the other words that he knows --and I hope they are the beginning of a trend! All of his other words are very expressive. He uses them to tell us how he is feeling or what he wants. In his previous lexicon, there were words to convey happiness ("hi"), amusement ("aht" and "doh"), desire ("juz" and "eee"), or abject misery ("nono" and "mama"). But these new words he uses simply for the joy of naming something. With pride, he points out birds at the park and says "duht". He gets just as much pleasure out of holding aloft his toy duck at home. He also identifies his toy penguin as a "duht". I think that's rather clever since we didn't teach him that at all. And whenever we put his shoes on or take them off, he repeats over and over (while ki...