Talk to Me, Kid
Posted by Arwen Mosher in Family on Wednesday, April 22, 2009 9:45 PM
I’m the oldest of six children, so I was around when my five younger siblings were babies and toddlers. I thought I was paying attention, but I guess I wasn’t, because a huge amount of the development of my little ones is completely new to me.
I remember my brothers and sisters learning to talk. They talked a lot. Nevertheless, observing my daughter’s verbal development over the past eighteen months, from a six-word vocabulary at age one to near-fluency at age two-and-a-half, has been an adventure. I thought I’d observed the process before, but Camilla surprises me again and again.
There was a lot of confusion when she was learning pronouns. For a long time she had “me” and “you” mixed up. She’d toddle up to me and hug my legs, turn her little face toward mine and ask appealingly, “Pick you up?”
Actually, that memory makes me kind of sad that she learned the pronouns correctly!
I expected that she’d pronounce certain sounds incorrectly, but I never expected that she’d voluntarily pronounce sounds incorrectly. Camilla learned the hard ‘Y’ sound early on, but her cousin and best friend Daniel mispronounced it as an ‘L’. After a while, Camilla suddenly started doing it too. She can say the ‘Y’ properly, she just chooses not to.
Ironically, Daniel has now learned the correct pronunciation, which means he says “you” and Camilla says “lou,” an exact reversal of what they were doing a few months ago. Bizarre.
Bryan and I are well aware that little pitchers have big ears, which is why we spell some key words like i-c-e c-r-e-a-m when Camilla’s around. I think we might have to be even more careful as she gets older, though.
I often say “here’s the deal,” to Camilla, as in, “Here’s the deal: we’re not going to read books until after your teeth are brushed.” This morning she and I were having a discussion, and she was frustrated that I wasn’t agreeing to her wishes. When she’d finally realized I wasn’t going to change my mind, she was quiet for a moment, then turned to me, gestured, and declared, “Here’s the deal: we are going to change my diaper and THEN we are going to go to Daniel’s house.”
It had been my plan in the first place, but she made it sound like she was in charge… and she did it with an uncanny imitation of my tone of voice. I knew that she was listening, but I wasn’t aware she’d been listening quite that closely to the things I say!
How have your children surprised you verbally?
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