Last summer, in an attempt to keep Martin busy in the car, we started playing a new game that he calls "Yogos" (his own pronunciation of "logos").  In playing Yogos, we look for signs and try to gather clues about what we see to figure out what the sign represents.  For example, Burger King's logo looks like a hamburger, so we can tell that they have food there. 

I tried to introduce Martin to the concept of symbols by showing him a "No Parking" sign.  I explained that it was the letter P with a circle around it and a line over it.  The circle with a line through it always means "no", and asked him what he thought the sign meant.  "No peeing!" he said.  "You can't go to the bathroom ANYWHERE on this street, you have to go in that house."  I told him that was true, but in this case the "P" stood for "Parking" and it meant that you couldn't park on that side of the street.  But really, I thought his idea was better.

A few weeks ago my friend Meghan and I had a discussion about my job and I told her it was really hard for me not to laugh when people say things at the office like "cracked corn" and "lactating bitches".  Both of these phrases which can be heard around the office on a regular basis in reference to our product lines, but when they do, I seem to be the only one who is fighting off laughter (quite possibly proving that I have not advanced emotionally much past seventh grade).  Last week, my friend Meghan gave me the coolest shirt ever.  She had it made for a client, and she thought it would be good for me to wear to my job.



I showed it to Martin and asked him if he liked my shirt.  "It's a peaver, right?" he asked.

"No, it's not a BEAVER, it's a dog," I said.

"It's a momma dog with baby dogs and they're drinking milk, right?  It's a dog lunch Yogo," he explained.

What a smart boy.  Guess all of our work looking at Yogos and talking about picking up clues from graphics is paying off.  Of course, it could also be from his own internal desire to feed everything in sight.  This weekend I caught him trying to give a plastic frog some lunch.

He still doesn't totally get that he's not able to feed anything (let alone plastic toys) from his own body.  But at least this time when I asked him about it, he just said he was giving the frog some lunch and left out the part about using his blowhole.