Bea and Lewis Still

I don’t remember if I was pregnant with Lewis when I took Bea to the GA Aquarium. It was a weekday and my hope was that it wouldn’t be too crowded. Bea still needed to be mostly pushed around in a stroller. So, she was probably about a year and a half or so. She was starting to talk a good bit. No sentences but mostly small exclamations and usually relating to whatever was around her.

 

The entrance of the aquarium is quite dramatic. You pay and go into a room where there are what seems to be hundreds of fish swimming in tanks on either side of you. They are all the same species and look like large, shiny silver dollars. They are fast and don’t ever seem to stop moving.

Directly outside this room is the large rotunda that gets you into one of several exhibitions. The layout is not sequential. You go through one exhibit only to come out the other side into the rotunda again.

On this day we went first into the section that has a large beluga whale. My recollection of this visit is that there was just one whale there but she was set to have a calf in a couple of months and she looked a bit fat.

 

Anyway, Bea loved fish but had a hard time saying the word clearly. What came out sounded like something other than fish. So, we entered the room, she pointed and shouted “Look, big shit!” Or, at least that’s what it sounded like to me and everybody else in the room.

 

Fortunately for Bea her clarity of speech came quickly and her vocabulary was quite astounding. Her kindergarden teacher told me that when she would ask the kids in class to come up with words that started with a specific letter Bea would always throw in something unusual. Like “O” – oxygen! Or “F” “France”! Before kindergarden she knew the difference between an omnivore, herbivore and carnivore and could use the terms appropriately. Boy, she was one smart little girl.

Lewis seems to be following in her footsteps. He was a slow starter at speaking but now that he has a handle on it he uses just an extensive vocabulary as she ever did. I’m amazed and thankful that Bea is still showing her influence on him. She set a great example for her little brother.