B E A utiful.

Daniel learns new words all the time. Some surprise me (vitamin?!), some shock me (goodness!?) and some just make me laugh (coconut?!).

But the best words are the ones that come out of left field and completely melt me to the core.

We recently purchased "Wall-E" and have been watching pieces of it every day. He was riveted from the beginning, despite the lack of dialogue. When the girl robot "Eve" appeared for the first time, we told Daniel that it was Wall-E's friend. He shook his head firmly and told us, "No, that's a penguin." It took ten minutes of debating before he would accept that the penguin was also Wall-E's friend.

But I digress.

There's a scene in the middle where the two robots swirl and play together in space, leaving long graceful trails of color behind them. While watching this scene, Daniel announced, "Oh my goodness... that's beautiful!" Fernando and I looked at each other in amazement.

Something about the sound of that little voice saying "beautiful" just slays me. It's clunky and awkward, over-pronounced and congested. And it's beyond priceless.

That evening, he walked into his room, pointed to his cars and said loudly to no one in particular, "Look at all the beautiful cars!" And since then, it's been incorporated into his daily rotation of words. Last week, I tried to convince him to tell me, "Mommy, you're beautiful!"... but he would only said "I'm beautiful, too!"

The plants in our backyard are currently struggling to survive transplant shock, and Daniel likes to water them and take care of them. Two hibiscus plants just today produced gorgeous blooms, and Daniel smelled each one, pronouncing them "beautiful". This picture is him smelling one of the flowers. (We also had to teach him not to tear the flowers off the plants... but that is an issue for another blog post!)

I knew vocabulary acquisition would be fun and exciting, but I didn't expect it to be this... beautiful!