Wham! Bang! Bump! Kapow!

Over the past month, Sam has become obsessed with words. He's figured out that combinations of letters symbolize things in the real world and so wants to know what every word he has daily contact with is. What does this mean to our life? It means that in the morning when he helps me pour his apple juice, we have to stop and I have to tell him every word on the bottle. It means that as we're leaving the grocery store, he pulls back, rears his head up, and asks about the "Exit" sign, pointing to every letter and spelling "E-X-I-T" over and over again. It means that when we read a book, we have to go through each page of front matter to get to the main story (although, thankfully, he's satisfied with my explanation of "that's the copyright information" so we don't have to read every ISBN and LOC line of small print).

After going through this ritual for a month, he's memorized numerous words that float throughout his life. And typical of Sam, most of those words deal with trains and cars and buses. He has a placemat with all sorts of vehicles on it and around the outside edge are words like "crash" and "screech" and "wham." Wouldn't you know it, Sam knows those words but still has no clue when it comes to words like "the."

I predict he'll have a healthy future as a comic book writer.