My kid is a babbler. Always has been. Since the day he was born he’s been making noises with his mouth.

At the start there wasn’t much substance to the things he was “saying” – they were the typical ga-gas and wah-wahs and MMMBop sounds that all babies make. But, striver that he is, he has never rested; in his ongoing quest to master the English language, he makes great strides everyday.

Of course, as I said yesterday, children are stupid, and the strides our son has made are great only when compared to other people under two. They’re not all that impressive when compared with, say, Noam Chomsky.

At a year-and-a-half old, while his vocabulary has been growing exponentially, he hasn’t even reached the level of “darndest” yet.

Sure, a lot of the things he says are funny, and he thinks almost everything he says is hilarious, but it takes MomandBuried and I some time before we can even figure out what he’s trying to say. Like Bane in the first Dark Knight Rises trailers.

So I thought I’d start putting some of those things down here on my blog, complete with definitions. (There is no phonetic denotation because every one of these words sounds exactly like it looks like it sounds. It’s baby talk, people!) Keep in mind that many of these words have multiple meanings, and many of these definitions are nothing more than our best guesses.

Word: Coo-coo
Part of speech: noun
Definition: Shorthand for the phrase “Comfy-cozy”; see below
Sentence: “Coo-coo? Coo-coo?” (He’s not big on sentences just yet.)

When giving my son his milk, my wife prefers to have him lay down, as it helps him drink it faster and prevents him from wandering around with the bottle, dripping milk all over the house. To entice him into this position, she will lay down herself, on the couch, under a blanket, and invite him up to get “comfy-cozy.” The first time she proposed this to my son, he took to it immediately.

And then he kept taking to it, to the point that nowadays he is constantly requesting “comfy-cozy” time by pointing at the couch or the blanket and saying “coo-coo? Coo-coo?”

It’s cute as hell and often equally annoying. Especially when he wants to “coo-coo” when he’s supposed to be eating dinner.

We’ve created a monster. A coo-coo monster. Or maybe a cereal mascot. Ooh, even better: a real McMurphy-type!

Because a lobotomy is not out of the question.