My favorite word

Tesshin's favorite word is "ah-may-ya". We don't know what it means but he'll say it all day long. He'll wake up and his first word is "ah-may-ya". Everything he repeats is "ah-may-ya". I asked Miss Madeline (day care lady) if she knew what it meant but she said she thought that it was a Japanese word we were trying to teach him. So Tesshin has us all stumped.