Happy

There are many  little words that a mother longs to hear from her baby, growing into a toddler and now a preschooler.  Kees's vocabulary is growing at an exponential rate lately.  Coupled with the fact that he imitates nearly every word we utter, both in French and English, he is a little vocal machine: he tells you when his food is "hot! chaud!" or when he sees a "boat! bateau!", or that he wants to go "house, maison."  He likes to state as many things as he can in both languages, just to be sure that both Tony and I understand exactly what he wants.

The other day, while Sacha was in preschool, Kees and I went to visit my Baba.  We were having a conversation about food (or something similar, although I am pretty sure it was about food) and Kees came crawling into my lap and kept iterating something over and over.  I wasn't really paying attention to what he was saying, since I was still talking to Baba, so he grabbed my face in his little hands and made me look at him.

"Ma ta,' he said, which is his approximation to "Je t'aime" which is "I love you" in French.

'Je t'aime aussi, Kees."

Then he hugged me and buried his face into my shoulder and said "Happy."

And that made me the happiest I have been in a long time.