L3 (27 mo) understands more and more all the time. But his spoken vocabulary is still very limited. He has a “tsss” sound he uses and a yes-grunt and the word “no,” among a few other words. We forget often that he understands as much as he does.
We were packing up in the vans to drive from MN back to CO after team retreat and I told L3 to go hop in his carseat (still rear-facing). L3 promptly ran to the vehicle, but ran to the OPPOSITE side as his car seat and climbed up in the middle row captain’s seat and tried to buckle himself in with a regular seat belt. L3 made it very clear that he wanted to sit in a regular seat instead of in his car seat. The intern whose seat L3 was sitting in tried to get him to move to no avail. Eventually, a staff member’s teenage niece came over to convince him to climb in his car seat.
“Look at your special seat over there. It’s so nice… no else else has a seat like yours. It’s built just for you! Oh! How nice it is! I’d like a seat like that….”
She continued on for three or four minutes before wrapping up enthusiastically with, “Wouldn’t you like to go sit in your seat?!?!?”
L3 looked at her and said simply, “No.”
His brevity was such a contrast to her paragraph that it was hilarious. I was turning his car seat front-facing while she was trying to convince him. When he realized his car seat was different, he was happy to try it out and excited about forward-facing.