Tiger is now two and a half years old, and has certainly come a long way from the “Small Beginning” he made when he began speaking around a year ago.

It still takes us by surprise that, somewhere in the past one year, his vocabulary shot up so suddenly and significantly that most folks who meet him, find it hard to believe that he’s just two.  It’s almost as if he was accumulating all the words he was listening to, only to explode like a volcano one day with every thing that’s inside!

There are a number of things he says routinely, that are so typical and unique… and special.  Here are some of my favourite examples…

When he’s angry with someone’s behaviour, he’ll come up to them, make his best “angry” face and tell them in a stern voice : “I’m angee with you!”

Like Pumpkin, he also can’t pronounce any word that starts with an ‘s’.  So, “school” becomes “cool”, and “stand” becomes“tand”, and so on and so forth.

His favourite animals are dinosaurs, and his favourite movie is Ice Age 3 in which the most “powerful” role is that of the “mama dinosaur”.  So, he’s grown up with the thinking a “mama dinosaur” is the most powerful beast that ever walked this Earth.  And, about 1017 times in a day, he rushes at someone with one of his favourite glow-in-the-dark dinosaur models in his hand, threatening them with the words: “I’m a mama dinosaur, and I’m coming to eat you…”

The other day, he observed that he and I are both “boys”, so I gently corrected him saying, “That’s true, but I’m a grown up boy which is called a ‘man’.”  So he clarified, are you a “Papa man”?  I said yes.  He immediately added, “I’m a mama man!” in the voice he uses when he threatens us with “mama dinosaur”!!!

Speaking of grown ups, he struggles with the phrase and always ends up calling them “growm ups” !

Early on in life, he figured out his own name for a sleeveless shirt.  He calls it a “tickle tickle t-shirt” since it’s so much easier to tickle him in his armpits when he’s wearing one of those!

He frequently asks us what is our favourite colour, and God help you if you happen to answer that your favourite colour is something that you’re not wearing on your clothes!  He will argue with you that your favourite colour is not X since you’re wearing Y.  That’s that. (His favourite colour is “blown“, by the way.  Pronounced as “brown” with an “l”)

One of the things I really find amusing is his constant effort to figure out the world around him.  Almost every new thing we show him, or something he encounters by himself, is followed by an innocent question: “It’s for eating?”

Whenever we’re watching the TV or a movie, and he sees a really pretty girl on screen, he looks at me or his mama and says, “I like her.  She’s my friend.”  That usually means he’s taken a fancy for this one.  And, I have to admit, it’s always the prettiest thing in the entire cast!

Somewhere along the way, he’s also developed the habit of allowing me to go to office only after he tells me a secret in my ear.  What is it, you ask?  Well, it’s a secret!

Watch this space for more.

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