Sweet Talker

Mason's been having a rough couple of days. He hasn't been sleeping well at night, or during naps for that matter, he's been eating constantly, and I can tell his belly's been hurting him. Maybe it's the bananas. Maybe it's teething. Maybe it's some kind of weird six and a half month growth spurt. Maybe it's another milestone - crawling? I really have no idea what it is, but I'm tired. We now have playtime between the hours of one and three in the morning. No, I'm not kidding. He giggles, plays with his feet, pokes me in the face, and rolls around the bed until there's no way I could possibly be sleeping.

Yesterday, I went to the mall (alone!) and finished up the rest of my Christmas shopping. When I came home, I had a plan to get some things done around here. I wanted to hang some lights around the fireplace, bake sugar cookies (from scratch!) and decorate them, and wrap presents. Miraculously, I managed to get the lights put up:

And that's pretty much as far as I got. I took everything out to make the cookies before realizing that I was out of flour. Okay, fine, I guess I'll make cookies some other night then, no big deal. I tried not to let myself get too worked up about it and I dragged all the wrapping paper, bows, ribbon, and boxes out of the closet. I had just sat down with my presents when, of course, Mason squeeks from the bedroom. I went in, rocked him back to sleep and, a half an hour later, resumed my position on the floor and started to wrap. I got two presents in and guess what? I'm out of tape.

After all that, I gave up on the evening and just went to bed, so of course I had ten thousand things to do this afternoon and I needed Mason to take a nap. I took him into the bedroom, layed him down, and this is how our conversation went:

Me: Mase, it's naptime, okay?

Mase: Da-da-da-da-daaaaa-doooo

Me: Twinkle, twinkle, little star (etc, etc, etc..)

Mase: Maaaa-maaaa-ba-ba-ba-ba-baaa!

He's not just making noise anymore, he's trying to talk to me! Within twenty-four hours, Mason's gone from mostly just being able to make vowel sounds to actually combining vowel and consonant sounds together. He's listening to language, making sense of it, and trying to mimick it. I'm amazed by the linguistics aspect of it all as well as the proud Mommy aspect. It was so cute that I didn't care that nothing was getting done or that I was exhausted. When he started talking to me, I forgot about everything on my to do list.

As far as I'm concerned, I'd rather just buy some prepackaged sugar cookies at Walmart and sit around talking to Mase all day.