As the Bear nears the dawning of the third year of his life, one of my favourite things about this stage in his development is his increasing vocabulary and communication skills. Every once in a while we have a conversation that makes me marvel at how much a tiny person understands and is able to communicate. Other times it’s his word choice or pronunciation that puts a smile on my face and a twinkle in my eye.

Like how he thinks cats say “Me-wow” and still ends every “May I …” request with a “Yes may youuuuu.”

In order to understand the following story, you need to know that we were staying in a resort near Kruger that had Vervet Monkeys — they’d come from the jungle area nearby and bypass the electric fencing by making their way through the trees. When they came for a visit, their watchful little eyes were ready to seize an opportunity to slip through an open window and raid a cupboard or ruin an unattended meal.

Our place had a balcony to the great outdoors and little guys like this one were watching in the grass below…

DSC_7968

{Don’t let that innocent face fool you…he’s up to monkey business.}

Recently a conversation took place between the Hubs and the Bear that fell into the delightful twinkle-in-my-eye-marvelling-Mama category, and it went a lil’ something like this:

Scene: The Baby has two dummies. The orange one is missing and was last seen in the hands of the elder brother. The interrogation begins.

Hero Hubs: Bear, what did you do with your brother’s dummy?

The Bear: {unintelligible mumbles and squeals}

HH: Bear, you were the last one to have Blake’s dummy. What did you do with it?

Bear: A monkey came and grab it.

HH: Now I know that this little monkey (gesturing at the Bear) grabbed it, but what happened to it?

Bear: I drop it and kick it into da garden. And monkey came and grabbed it.

We almost found the story a little hard to believe, and we haven’t been able to stop laughing about it. I asked the Bear to tell me what happened to Blake’s dummy again later, and this was the response:

The Bear: I just kick into garden and a monkey grab.

Me: Did that really happen or are you telling a story?

Bear: Happened.

So friends, somewhere in the bushveld far far away, a vervet monkey is up a tree, and she is using the first pacifier our second son ever used to soothe her baby monkey to sleep.

How’s that for monkey business?

xCC