luca speak

perhaps you have noticed the luca speak box on my blog. this serves several purposes. the first for translation. on occasion i will quote my son and you may need help deciphering his pronunciations. second, he is a funny guy. he says cute things and some of our favorite and his most commonly used words will appear in this section.

luca has come a long way in his journey to talking. this time last year he was saying a few words (mama, dada, elmo). but instead of learning new words as time went on, he stopped using the few he had and began to suffer from recurrent ear infections. soon, we were worried enough about possible long term effects of the infections and were referred to an audiologist. our fears were confirmed when his tests were positive for hearing loss in both ears and major fluid blockage was found. in october 2006, he was scheduled for a surgical procedure to have bilateral pressure equalization tubes placed. it was so scary to see our little guy in a hospital gown and know that he would be put under general anesthesia. he of course had no idea what was going on and thought that the three of us hanging out in the bed watching dora on the portable dvd player was great fun. even knowing the procedure is minor, simple, and fairly common did not make it less emotional to watch them wheel him past the double doors. fifteen minutes later the doctor came out to tell us luca was fine and in recovery - yes it was super quick. we went to see our little picollo and found him to be very clingy and sad. he did not like waking up with strangers and being so groggy. within a week of the surgery, he had added 10 new words to his vocabulary and it has been growing ever since.

jesse and i are sometimes surprised by the things that come out of the boy's mouth. we call him the little parrot. this is not good when you drop something heavy on your foot, swear, and then realize luca is only a few feet away. (yes, this has happened and we pretended we did not hear luca yell this word - thankfully it was never repeated.) but hearing my boy say "mama here!" when i walk in his room in the morning or listen to him sing his "horsey songs" are treasured and priceless.