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Potato, Potahto

One of Austen's favorite songs (or rather, one of my favorite songs to sing to Austen, and one which he tolerates) is Let's Call The Whole Thing Off. You know, the "you say eether, I say iither" song. This weekend Al suggested that we could make up new lyrics to it based on Austen's current manglings of the English language, and I related this suggestion to Hannah this morning. The version we came up with went something like this:

I say water and you say li'lo
I say stroller and you say llor
Water, li'lo, stroller, llor
Let's call the whole thing off

I say cantaloupe and you say lopelope
I say car and you say go
Cantaloupe, lopelope, car, go
Let's call the whole thing off.

I could go on, of course. After weeks of Austen saying "ahdjuwah," I finally said to Al in exasperation this morning, "what the heck is 'ahdjuwah'? Do you know what 'ahdjuwah' means?" He did not. Hannah figured it out from the context when we were serving up melon in the kitchen later, though. Apparently she often asks him, "do you want another one?", so we now think that "ahdjuwah" means "another one." Austen nodded when we proposed this, so I think she's right.

Oh, and did I mention that Austen knows what a Saab is? Austen has been pointing out "go"s for weeks, but while we were on vacation in Maine we realized that he was pointing out very specific gos. It's uncanny that he can pick out 9-3 hatchbacks (like our 1999 model), 9-3 sedans, 9-5 sedans and wagons, even 9000s. Al said, "those are Saabs!", so now Austen will yell "ba!" (also the word for "bus", though "bus" is starting to have an "esh" sound on the end—all words that end in s end in esh for Austen, including eish, yesh, and reish) every time he spots a Saab. Occasionally he'll confuse a VW Jetta or a Mazda 6 for a Saab, but more often than not if he yells "ba!", there's a Saab nearby.