Three little words

I mentioned before that Walter has started in on three word sentences.  Tonight's was the best yet.

We got home a little late from an outing to Kohl's.  Baba was in the kitchen, putting stuff away. (Baba is staying with us this week while Sean is out of town.) I was with Walter in the living room, taking off my shoes.

Walter was doing what's he's done every day this week ... as soon as his feet hit the floor, he's off and running to his train track.  Baba and Walter fashioned a tunnel out of a piece of his Noah's ark, and sending his train through that tunnel has been a source of endless entertainment.  Recently he's been reinacting his favorite video of the moment, "Cookie Monster and the Ballad of Casey Macphee," which Walter calls "AB choo choo" or "Cookie uh-oh."

It's the epic tale of a heroic engineer faced with both danger and an ethical dilemma. It has also added the word "avalanche" to Walter's vocabulary.  He knows Cookie is going to be OK, but the avalanche makes him nervous every time. Retelling and acting out the story seems to help.  He does this by putting crayons on his train track, sending his train over them, and then rescuing the train when it derails.

Tonight he was setting the stage for this drama when a piece of his train track came loose.  The track is made to fit together like a very basic jigsaw puzzle. I've pointed this out to Walter before, and any mention of "puzzle" intrigues him, but so far he hadn't been able to put it together himself. Tonight he asked for help right away. "Help please Baba!" he called out. Baba answered from the kitchen that he was on his way.

In the amount of time it took Baba to get to the living room and for me to take off my left shoe, something remarkable happened.  Walter ran over to me and said, very proudly, "Walter got it!"

I looked up and, sure enough, Walter had put the track together himself. "That's wonderful, Walter!" I said. "You put the track together all by yourself.  I'm very proud of you." He smiled a big smile and went back over to the table to play.  "Are you proud, too?" I asked.  He looked up at me and nodded.

"Walter got it!" What a great sentence. What a great kiddo.