Now we're talking

Jack's vocabulary has grown enormously, so much so that I've been unable to keep up with it. Partly because, as Danny pointed out, he will repeat anything you say if it's two syllables or less and you preface it with "Jack, can you say..." so I don't know if that counts as a word or if I have to wait until he uses it on his own unprompted. I recently watched him name every animal in the ABC book that Rebeccah/Friday Mom has, and he has a grasp of some of the finer distinctions in the animal kingdom (dolphins vs whales vs sharks, seals vs walrus, hawk vs eagle, penguin vs puffin) thanks to Blue Planet. But just in the last week, I heard him say his first sentence: "bye-bye daddy!" Then, shortly after that, he said his second: "daddy home!" Are you picking up on a theme here? Danny said it made him feel good, but also really really bad. At first it was a celebratory remark, waking up to daddy, exclaiming at his good fortune, "all right, daddy's home!" Then it turned into more of a lament, when he woke up and daddy wasn't there, as in "when will daddy be home?" or "I want daddy to come home!" Now he has decided this is a useful device to attach to other things he wants and cannot (at least immediately) have. He points at the tv where his iguana lives and croons "unga home!" He reaches for the toy that has fallen out of his grasp in the car on the way to nana's and cries "whale home!" Maybe to Jack home means "this thing is so desperately and inseparablely a part of my being I must have it right this instant!" Kind of a souped-up obsessive version of "home is where the heart is." I'm excited for him to start stringing more words together and see what other thought-provoking philosophy emerges.