The Leon Thesaurus

The biggest advances Leon has made lately are in expressing his thoughts and commenting on everything he sees. He has quite a complex system of using only a few words with different intonations to describe a wide range of phenomena. For example:

"Peeh" means what you think it would but also "push" (whether a stroller or a button) and also fork (from the Slovak word "pich," which means poke)

"Amaa" is his name for Grandma but he generously applies it to Grandpa also :). Oddly, that is also his word for helicopter. Actually, it is not that odd, considering that Dari points out the government helicopters we frequently see overhead as having Obama in them, sometimes multiple Obamas, depending on how many helicopters there are. So I think that's where Leon got it. DC baby, what can I say.

"baby" means baby but Leon also refers to all yogurts with that word because the brand he usually gets has a picture of a yogurt-eating baby on it. This results in some interesting statements on my end, such as "Leon, I'm sorry, you can't have a baby, you ate them all already and we have to go to the store to get some more."

"Daah" is what he says for Dari (and Daddy, but that is understandable). Everything was Daah, however, when Dari left for a week in Kentucky and Leon was really missing him. Dari's chair, cup, toys, shoes, everything. He even insisted that the little boy we saw at the airport wearing jammies like Dari's WAS Dari, and he made me walk over there and say hi. Too cute. This is how happy he was to see his big brother again (blurry because Dari was excited too and was rocking him on his knees)!

He also has one word for all opposites. So he says "open" when he wants something both open, and closed. This was a bit of an issue when we were on the plane to Vienna and he wailed about wanting his seatbelt open and open and open, no matter its actual status. The key fact to note here, however, is that Leon had his OWN seat belt. I was feeling adventurous when I was making the flight reservations and did NOT get Leon a ticket, taking advantage of likely the last trip where he could be a lap child. I was not completely oblivious to how difficult this might be and so I very strategically selected / paid to reserve seats on the plane that would make this doable (there is some extra space in economy class, if you know where to look for it). However, a check-in employee who thought he was being helpful moved us from those seats, which left me in a slight state of panic as we were about to board and I realized this. The Lufthansa manager was very nice about this though, and Leon either charmed or scared her into upgrading the lady who was seated next to us to 1st class and so the flight was MUCH more comfortable for all involved. Thank you, Austrian. Here is Leon sleeping in his bonus space, all buckled in with a new glowing baby and stuffed bear that he got for early Christmas from Daddy and my friend Sarah, respectively.

This would be practically impossible on any U.S. airline, as we all know. EXCEPT Southwest, who we flew to KY for Thanksgiving (that was a lot of fun for Leon, see video links at the bottom). Their free seating arrangement let us basically grab an extra seat, after getting a permission at check-in, when it was clear the flight would not be completely full. Nice, right? Ok, those are all the airline endorsements I can offer. Besides these satisfied and / or plain shocked looks from our lucky traveler:

We also tried to take advantage of the high density of humans on the flight to finally nail down the difference between man and woman but Leon is still leaning towards referring to most people as ladies. To be fair, there was a man with a pony tail right across the aisle from us... Leon even got his own lecture from Dari about this, who tried to painstakingly convince his little brother that Mr. Rogers is, indeed, a man (Uyo) and not a lady (teta). It was very funny to watch and also kind of awesome because they were totally having a conversation.

http://youtu.be/G1k7vM1ZKAc

http://youtu.be/RXpeVB6HZ00