"hi"

if you have ever been around boden, you know he loves to jabber on. he looks at you and uses inflections as though he was really communicating something very important. sometimes even stopping to laugh, seemly at something he said. for quite some time now we have been thinking we hear real words coming out of his precious lips, but have not been able to call it with 100% certainty. of course, we are certain that he says dada, as he is always chattering on about him. squealing when he comes into the room - "dada". i ask, who it is, "dada", and so on. i claim mama, as he will say "mama" sometimes when he wants me to pick him up. other words that we sometimes think, did he just say that, have been 'outside' (which we have heard it separately and together, but only once at a time and can't quite decide if it is for real. if it is, then that was his first real word.), 'orange monkey' (just once and it was right after we had said it), and 'hi'. we had been thinking that he was saying it for a few days but weren't totally sure. i always thought that when kids started saying words they would say it distinctly and with such clarity that it would be unmistakable. if you asked them to say it again, they would. maybe for some children/parents it is. either we are a little slower on the draw to actually admit that he has said something than others are, or it is a little bit more of a process. anyway, we have been like: i thought i heard him say 'hi' today, the other: i thought i heard him say it the other day too.... well, it has been getting more and more frequent and now we have two other parties that have heard it too and are backing us up. the one is my mother. i was talking to her on friday and put boden on the phone and he said 'hi' a couple times. she told me we should count it. then this saturday we went bike riding with brett and sara (more fun on that later) and they heard boden said it and told us we should count it, and they are nurses. today and yesterday he has started saying 'hi' while waving. so........... all that to say! we are counting 'hi' as his first real word (besides dada and mama). over on the right, you will see that we have started a new list of boden's words. we plan to have them go in order with the most recent at the top. so, his first word was dada and his last word that we're counting is 'hi'.