We've been having a good time with Reid's newfound powers of speech. It's strange, because he seemed like a slow starter in the speech department. He wasn't really saying a lot of words, but he was talking a great deal. Still, his list of words wasn't growing that fast. We didn't say anything, but we wondered about it.

Still, I wouldn't consider him a wordsmith. But what has happened is something very impressive. He's completely talking, in sentences with complex sounds like "cth" (as in icthyoligist" and "nch" as in "inchworm"), but he isn't making a whit of sense. He thinks he is, clearly. It's just that, more precisely, we don't understand the language he's speaking.

He walked up to me in the bathroom the other day and said "Na huth ka itch rara?" It was clearly a question. About what, I have no idea. He gestured toward the living room and then looked away. Then he looked back and seemed to repeat part of the earlier inquiry, as if further pressing me on a certain issue. "Itch rara?"

I didn't know what to say.

This is happening more and more. We recognize a lot of words, like apple, banana, mommy, daddy, quack (the answer to "what does a duck say?"), duh (our dog's nickname in Reid's mind, for more reasons than just that it's short for Dixie), and others. But they come up in 'conversation,' it seems, and I wish we could figure it out. Some of the time, it's pretty clear. Most of human conversation is in the context. When Reid is holding a box of cereal and says, "He tutu rif gunth gra," it is generally known that he is asking for more Puffins. But the bathroom conversation relayed above remains a mystery.

Reid got a Mr. Potato Head recently. As soon as he removed all of the arms, feet, eyeglasses, eyes, noses, lips, teeth and ears from the chamber on Mr. Potato Head's back, he couldn't believe there was nothing else inside. "Where's the rest?" he seems to be asking, though what he said was "Rho gostil ichth treyfo?"