Words words

Emmett is turning into a regular old parrot. He is starting to repeat words that he hears a lot, and yesterday Andrea and I took him to the park where he heard a woman yelling either to her kid or her dog "run run run!" and Emmett said "run run run." Both Andrea and I were shocked. Yesterday was the first day (that I recall) where Emmett really used the word "up" in its proper context...except when he says it his arms are held upwards in front of one of us and he yells it as a command which has made us realize that we should really push "please" as an early learned word. He is saying "mom" a lot (repeating it more than asking Andrea for permission to do something), repeats words like lunch and grass. He will point to our bicycle helmets or his hat and say "hat", although his "hat" often doesn't sound terribly different from "cat." When Andrea's mom was in town, she read an Elmo book to Emmett and he immediately tried (and continues to try) to say "Elmo"---which is easy to distinguish from all of his other words as it is his only two-syllable word. There are two funny things about Elmo: 1) when Jan read the book to him he had never seen Elmo on TV, had never seen a doll, and had never heard his voice, but he was immediately obsessed with Elmo carrying the book everywhere and repeating his two-syllable interpretation of Elmo's name. I am convinced that it is the perfect roundness of Elmo's head and eyes, the big smile, etc. that captivated Emmett, but this argument was countered by Andrea who pointed out that cookie monster also has similar features (though a bit heftier). The second funny thing is that we were over at Augie's house with Augie and Anne on Sunday and they had an Elmo book which Emmett found and immediately latched onto. What was funny about this (or perhaps not so) was that Emmett found it, said his two-syllable Elmo-ish word, and Andrea and I both immediately turned into "those parents" who were ecstatic that our child could speak when any unbiased person could tell that our kid is just making sounds. At least Anne was kind enough to not point out that our kid can't say Elmo yet.