Things she says, part 1

Adventures in what happens when a new person starts to be able to make their thoughts known to the people around them.

Here's some highlights of things she's said to me, offered without (much) further comment...

Going to high tea?

No. We're not going to high tea now.

Going to high coffee?

What are you doing?

I'm making cous cous.

Ha ha ha ha. Funny.

No. Really. Cous cous is a real thing.

Let me see this goose goose.

About a month and half ago we were on the tube. At one stop the doors opened and she saw a poster on the wall advertising a book. Suddenly she says I see her. I see her! I watch her on the Daily Show!

It took me few moments to realise the ad was for I am Malala by Malala Yousafzai who we saw on the Daily Show couple of weeks previously. Clearly she's taking in far more than I expected.

Careful, the water might be to hot for you. Your skin's a bit delicate.

I am not delicate, I am a little girl. Little girls are not delicate. Little girls are LITTLE GIRLS.

I found poo in the bed.

What!?

Pooh. I found Pooh in the bed. He's here.

to wife From now on we're only ever calling him Pooh Bear.

What should we do with your leftover pasta? Should we save it?

No.

What should we do with it?

Feed it to monkeys

...

It makes sense

I found that

where did you find that?

In your pocket.

jokingly, to me Stop it! Bad Monkey!

indignant You're not a bad monkey! You're a good good good good good good good good man.

holds up a big sea shell
do you know what this is?

Yes

What is it?

uuuuuuuh. A hedgehog

What says "meow"?

A cat!

What else says "meow"?

Three cats!

If you eat all your grapes on time, I will go out and buy you some lychees.

And come back?

While watching a montage in a move where the heroes are learning new skills
Do you want to learn to play piano?

I do.

Do you want to learn to fence?

I DO!

Don't do that. It's dangerous.

She continues doing it

Wait... Do you know what dangerous means?

Yes

what does it mean?

I'm doing something

Language

This first batch of posts after my long hiatus are generally going to be all about changes to the girl that have happened in the past few months. There's a lot of them. It's impressive how fast these things come in. She just changes suddenly and it's just now a part of who she is. Then she changes again. Layer upon layer, turning into a person.

At 2½ she talks quite clearly now. She even occasionally uses such elaborate tenses as I would like to have... or multi syllable words like I'm frustrated or interesting turns of phrases I don't care for stones (said when eating lychees). On the other hand she still doesn't entirely understand how to structure sentences – she'll surround the subject with verbs rather just inverting the subject and verb: What is that is?

The best way I can try to illustrate how she's developed in just the past few months in how she refers to pictures of herself. We have a screensaver that loops through randomly all the photos we've ever taken of her. When we watch it with her, we'd point to her and say That's you.
Needless to say, when she started talking, and even up until this summer, she'd point to a picture of herself and say That's you!

I tried explaining it to her how it works, but it's really hard. No, I say that's you, because it's you. But you have to say that's me. I kept telling her that for ages. It didn't sink in.

About a month ago got through her head that saying That's you was somehow wrong, so she started using her own name instead. Dropping the pronoun entirely: That's [name]!

Just a few days ago, she pointed and said That's me!, which she's been saying ever since.

One thing that's really cute is how she pauses to think of the right word to say. She'll be talking, then stop and look up and slightly to the left or right, maybe saying aaah then she'll look back at you, say the word and continue.

Reading to her has gotten interesting since she's quite good at remembering the text. For a number of the simpler stories, all I have to do is turn the pages and she'll recite the right part of the story to me. She misses some words here or there, and does her own interpretation of the meaning sometimes. There's one book which she got for her birthday which she would recite one page as Sometimes good. Sometimes bad... Last week she picked it up again and included the full text, rather than just the meaning: Sometimes you're good. Sometimes you're bad... It's like she always knew the words, it's just that then she decided that the "you're" was significant.

The girl is doing surprisingly well on her long path towards reading. She starting to kind of get the idea that the letter a word starts with is important, but she's not quite sure how. Fortunately we have some games to work with, like this set of cards with a picture the name of the thing spelled out. Like a picture of an umbrella that says "umbrella" underneath.

If left to my own devices, I would most likely get too tempted to start with the annoying parts of English, S is for 'see', C is for 'cue', Y is for you, D is for 'Double you', A is for 'are', E is for 'eye' and so on.

But instead, we've found a practical way to try to teach her about letters. So she can now recognise upper case letters and has got her head around most lower case ones as well – "l" and "i", "u" and "n", "d" and "a" are the trickiest. A couple of days ago I convinced her "ll" was two els instead of an H with a hard-to-see bar. So now when she sees "ll" instead of double-el or el-el she says els.

She also had lots of trouble with going through the letters of "cat". She kept saying c-d-t.

That's not a D, it's a lowercase A. They look similar, but the line on top of the A is much smaller.

c-d-t.

It's an A sweetie.

c-d-a-t.

Close enough.

We have more work ahead of us.

I like you, two

So far I'm really loving two years old. She's really turned into a proper little person. The big notable change beyond her ability to speak us now she has an imagination. I love the fact i can converse with her. It makes things so much easier now that she can tell me what she needs or wants. But mostly, it's the things she comes up with... concepts so off the wall, or strangely logical or shockingly wise for her age. It's just a delight to see what she comes up with next.

She can now remember and sing songs, or at least sing her interpretation of what she thought she heard days or weeks after hearing them. She doesn't always get the words right. Actually the times she gets the words wrong and makes up the replacements is what amuses me most (maybe more on that later).

This fall she went though a phase of asking us to Sing about x. Just picking some subject or person she knows about and asking us to sing about it. Sing about mamma, Sing about dinner, Sing about three. The weirdest one was Sing about doubt...

I don't think i can do that.
I don't think this will work.
This song won't be good enough
and I'll feel like a jerk.

I have to concede making up songs off the top of my head really kept me on my toes.

Shortly after her birthday she started making up names for her toys. So for the first time it wasn't just L and I naming toys for her. She has four rubber ducks. The big one is Mamma Duck. The blue one is Butterfly Duck. The one dressed as a pirate is Pirate Duck. And the small plain yellow one is Swings and Park.

Now she makes up names for her toys and various unnamed characters in books all. Most are sensible: Charlotte (sometimes Scarlet) the doll, Basil the dragon, Bartholomew the wraith. Some are weird, like Poad, Saddy, Floop and Queen Bee – people in a video game.

There's a bit of damage to the bathroom door from where we had to pry it from the wall to free her finger. She saw it a few months ago, pointed to it and called it dragon teeth. I have no idea where she got that from. But it does kind of look like it could be. This was the first time she came up with something so completely out of nowhere, I was very surprised when she said it.

One favourite of mine is her interpretation of the title of the book Don't Wake the Bear, Hare. She's not come across the word "hare" before, and she knows the book is about a rabbit, so she calls it Bunny, Don't Wake the Bear Here.

In retrospect I also really liked 6 months. That was realty the last time we could sling her up and take get with us and she'd stay quiet and calm the whole time. We could still go to diners and pubs without trouble and she'd yet to get us kicked out of anywhere.