Cheese!

We have many small children in my family, and we had several of them together during our visit to Ohio. We were taking lots of pictures, as any good parents (and aunts, uncles, and cousins) will do. We had the children all lined up on the glider, and all of the family photographers were saying, "Say cheese! Say cheese!"

Skylar, Cooper and Addison did just as they were told, exclaiming, "Cheese!"

Tucker looked back and forth to each of his cousins, then to the camera, and pronunced, "Cheese!"

That's right, ladies and gentlemen, you heard it hear first. Tucker said, "Cheese!"

The very sweet part of the whole story was that I wasn't in the room when he had this language breakthrough, but three people came running in to get me, each one shouting, "Tucker said cheese! Your son just said cheese!" It was very sweet to see how excited everyone was, right along with us.

He walked around the house all night, practicing his new word again and again, and each time he received praise and applause from whomever was listening. When he woke up the next morning, he really wanted to pick up right where he had left off, but he couldn't remember the word.

I could truly watch his thought process... He looked at me and beamed and said, "Shhhh. Shhheee. Sheee." He was probably thinking, "Last night, everybody made such a big deal over it... what was that word??"

By the way, we haven't managed to attach that word to the actual dairy product - only to the photo opportunity.

Leave it to my child to be motivated by a camera!