comprehension/retention

any idea where this little man came from?
i'm pretty sure i had a baby not so long ago.

i am regularly dumbfounded by how grown my little peanut is. in fact, it feels funny to call him peanut, even though that's primarily how i referred to him for the first 9-10 months of his life. (until my husband pointed out that the poor kid was likely to think his name was, in fact, peanut, at which point i tried to curb the habit.)

never am i more amazed, though, than at the things he remembers and tells me about loooooong after the fact. like yesterday when i picked him up from school, and he pointed at the black suv parked next to me and said, "keiser's truck!" somehow he remembered that when his friend keiser gets picked up by his mommy, that's the car they ride off in.

or how yesterday morning i told john that after school we were going to take the doggy for a run while daddy mowed the lawn. and when we got in the car yesterday afternoon, john said "mommy on a walk? john on a walk? buddy on a walk? daddy on the mower?"

there is just so much going on in that cute little brain. he seems to be constantly absorbing every single thing he sees and hears, and parroting it back - but in amazingly appropriate and accurate ways. it's not a matter of simple rote repetition - he is actually comprehending what he hears, retaining that information, and using it as needed.

this shouldn't be so amazing, i suppose - we all went through this process as we learned the world around us. but watching it, being witness to it, and assisting in it is so amazing, so boggling, and so humbling. human development is truly a miraculous thing to behold.