James Names (Part Two)

Well, I started calling James "Jafe" every once in a while anyway. A couple times he corrected me like this:

Me: "Watcha doin', Jafe?"
James: "No Jafe. Me Zhafv." (the pronunciation is slightly different...soft j, vocalizing with f sound)

But most of the time, he hardly noticed. I thought I was home free. Then, just a couple days ago, we were sitting on the couch with some books and I said, "You like that one, Jafe?" and he replied, "No Jafe. Me Zhamzth." He stopped for half a second and got a far off look in his eye. I could almost see the cogs turn in his brain. Then he spoke again with a big grin, "No Jafe. Zhamzth!" And he giggled as if he had just told a joke.

Now he only calls himself Zhamzth, which is phonetically closer to "James" than he's ever been. It was thrilling to witness him making that verbal leap, though I'm a little sad that maybe my use of the nickname "Jafe" spurred him to make that leap earlier than he normally would have.

And on that note, I will mention that Robert has made a speech leap of his own lately. Buddy has long had an anti-lisp. I don't know how else to describe it. Instead of making a "th" sound, he would use an "s" sound. So the word "thick" came out like "sick", while the word "this" came out more like "dis." When Alice got back from Houston, it's like she suddenly forgot how Robert spoke. She questioned and corrected his every mispronounciation, no matter how small. She was being kind of rude about it, so I asked her to stop. Robert noticed anyway. He has consciously been working on it ever since. Sometimes his "th" sound is exaggerated or misused, but he's almost got it down. His baby brother is now "Matthew" instead of "Massew." I'm excited to see him work on something important to him. I'm also a little sad to see that bit of childhood slip away this week.

And since I don't want to make a whole new blog post about it, I'll just mention here that I'm very, very happy with my hens this winter. They endured the -18F temps (-30F wind chill) very well. They huddled together for warmth, kept laying eggs, and made it through! Remarkable. It's been so cold that the food scraps freeze within minutes and stay perfectly intact. The chickens' poop is frozen rock-hard, too, in little golf ball size blobs. None of it is mixing or squishing or rotting like it usually does, so their pen is a real mess. Gotta put down more straw just to make it look nice :)