Word Girl

I know I'm biased, but I think Mabel is pretty witty for a four-year-old. She has always enjoyed words and sought out the big ones, but nowadays she finds rhymes and double meanings and asks why things are called what they are and why they aren't called something else.

If she doesn't become a lawyer (given her love of argument and her pathological need to have the last word) or an actress (given her flair for the dramatic and love of storytelling) or an author (obviously), she'll be a linguist or an etymologist. She might be all of those things.

She employs puns to their fullest:

• Watching DangerMouse - DM and Penfold land on top of the Toad and announce, "You're under arrest."
  Mabel: He is, because he's lying down so he's resting, and he's under them!

• Me, starting the car again after a quick return home for something it turned out we hadn't actually left behind: "To the pool, take two."
  Mabel: "But you're taking three."

She toys with idioms:

• The day after we saw our friend and her new(ish) baby: "I remember meeting Baby V like it was yesterday."

She plays with homonyms:

• "Can you compare a pear?"

She finds words within words:

• Europe! That's like syrup! Do they eat syrup in Europe? And watch the movie Up? 

She knowingly amuses me with hyperbole:

• In a grump, casting around for things to hate: "I don't like Miss P's bike. I don't like the colour of your glasses. I don't like the shape of our car. ... I don't like the colour of seethrough."

And now she's working the similes:

• "It's as dark as a bedroom."

or, to insult my cooking

• "It's as yummy as bum." 

Possibly a little yummier than bum

Just walk

When we moved into this house, Dash was four, and perfectly well able to talk. But we'd never had a basement before, so I suppose it was a new word to him. It was a long time before he stopped calling it the "abasement" (because I never wanted to correct him).

Mabel has no cute mispronounciations. She's a stickler, that one. At 3.5 she almost always conjugates correctly, she speaks idiomatically, and she likes to note when words rhyme. She can't wipe her own backside, but she can tell you all about it in no uncertain terms.

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Yesterday, when we went to the arboretum, I brought the stroller because I thought there might be some walking. There were three children younger than Mabel, but she was the only one riding in state to our destination. A four-year-old went on strike a little way along; his mother was having none of it, and he soon started plodding again without complaint. I looked on in amazement.

The problem, I realised, is that my children both have their father's stubbornness (or tenacity, as I like to call it when filling in school forms About My Child). I, on the other hand, was well-known to be a pushover years before we were even married. There are few issues I care strongly enough to really hold my ground on; if you want to insist that you have it your way, sure, you can probably do that and I'll go along with it. So I know that my kids will both hold out far longer than I care to on almost any point of dischord. And when the issue at stake is whether someone is walking or being carried, I like to split the difference, save all our faces, and take the easy option - a.k.a. the stroller.

Does this make me a worse parent than my friends whose children were walking? I like to think instead that I'm a parent who knows my child, and myself, and understands that the inevitable outcome of forgetting the stroller is a lot of complaining. Mostly from me, as I piggyback the child and carry the remains of the picnic lunch too. Maybe it just makes me a worse person, for being lazy, and allowing my children to keep that lazy gene in good working order by pandering to it. I shall call it "practical," if you don't mind.

I did make Dash walk, mind you. It's not like I ferry them both around in a double stroller. As if.

Poopy

Poopy is the word, it's the time, it's the motion. Poopy's the way she is feeling.

No, that's a bit misleading, now that I look at my oh-so-clever quote manipulation there. I mean, I wouldn't want you to think I was speaking literally, using "motion" in this context. It's just that with Mabel at the moment, everything is poopy. Poopy this, poopy that, I'm poopy, you're poopy, Dash in particular is very often poopy, we're all poopy. Except now and then one of us might be mutton-head. (That's a WildKratts reference. I'm told you had to be there, and I keep missing it. But she claims she means it as a compliment.)

She is three and a half, after all, so there had to be something. I think we're getting off pretty lightly if this is the sum total of her half-year behaviour-regression thingy. She's into calling people poopy and sometimes pinching them too, but mostly only if they're her brother. Poor Dash is trying hard not to take it personally, but if I hear "Waaaahhhh! Mabel pinched me and called me poopy," one more time in the next five minutes - well, it'll be just like all the previous five minuteses.

Poopy was not a word ever bandied around in this house before Mabel heard it last summer and had a brief fling with it, but now it has returned with a vengeance. While helping at nursery school recently I heard a teacher scold one of Mabel's classmates for saying it. His father, who happened to be there too, was shocked and wondered where he could have heard such a thing. I had to fess up that it was probably from my delightful daughter, and have a wee chat with Mabel about words we are not to use at school, to protect the delicate ears of those more innocent.

Personally, I don't really take much issue with poopy. As bad words go, it's pretty hilarious really, and I'd quite like to use it all the time too. Considering she has a six-year-old brother whose classmates, I know from my field-trip experience last week - know some much more serious bad words, I'm quite happy with it. But from the perspective of the other parent, I understand that I would have liked my only/eldest child to go as long as possible before hearing any of the less savoury elements of vocabulary, or even getting an inkling that words could be used like that, and I too would have been displeased if some moppet in Dash's class when he was three was wandering around firing off such epithets at random peers.

So I think she knows that she shouldn't say it at school, but at home it's a bit of a free-for-all, because I really don't have the energy to get all riled up every time the p-word is dropped; and since she's doing it for effect anyway, the best tack is clearly firm parental apathy. I suggested to Dash, who finds it hard to ignore, that he pretend she said something nice and respond with a cheery "Thank you!"

He's not sure this tactic is working yet, but at least it's more fun for all of us than hearing him whine about it.

One of the few times when she's not calling something poopy

Just a note

Mabel turned to me the other day and said: "Mommy, I am as-bo-lutely..." actually, I can't remember what she was absolutely, but I was charmed by her use of the word and her little stumble over it. It's pretty rare for her to mispronounce a word, really.

She did tell me a while ago that she likes ice because it's "refreshous" - but that's not a mispronounciation, it's a very intelligent word formation.

She's also taken to announcing, out of the blue and a propos of nothing at all, "Speaking of [whatever], I want [whatever else]."

I can't help thinking that, even though her early-talker status is no longer so obvious these days, her language is probably still a touch more, well, idiomatic than that of many other three-year-olds.

Dash came out of school a few weeks ago brandishing a note he'd written for me, that I had to read straight away before retrieving Mabel from the tree or moving the stroller out of the way of the exiting hordes of grade-schoolers. It said "I luv yoo", with a heart, and he was very proud of having written it without any help.

The next week he brought home a little note for each of us, that read "I luve you". I appreciated the addition of the silent e, and thought I wouldn't tell him about the u just yet. His father had no such qualms, and let him know, so that the very next day we all received our final verisons, with the correctly spelled message.

I'm keeping them all, but the first one is the specialest.

Wordation

I would love to record Mabel playing by herself and play back it for you (or, you know, for someone who would hear it and declare her a genius), because it's very entertaining. She not only does the voices, she also narrates the whole story. So she might be holding a Strawberry Shortcake doll and a dinosaur, or a small pony and a squishy frog, who will be each other's sisters, or mother and daughter, or some such relationship, and I'll hear:

...[Squeaky voice] No, you can't do that. You're not allowed to. Becuase it's naw-dy [American accent coming out there] and dangewous.
- [Other squeaky voice] But mother, I want to do it. I'll be vewy careful.
- [Normal voice, a bit sing-song] And then she went upstairs and climbed on the shelves and she fell off and hit her head. And she said [Squeaky II] Ow, my head.
- [Narrator] And her mother came upstairs to see what was going on and said [Squeaky I] Oh, sweetheart, are you all right?...

And on and on and on, only much funnier than that. If I listen carefully I hear her go over things we've been talking about, or things she wants to do, or things that are on her mind - going to sleep on your own, the ever-present little sister role, working out the concept of death, even. It's also a little unnerving to hear your own words coming out of someone else's mouth, and makes me very happy that I've managed to excise swearwords from my vocabulary, because I know she'd be using them right now if she'd heard them.

Speaking of which. Dash has taken to saying "Aw, nuts," when something frustrates him. After listening to this for a while I decided it was probably not the most gentlemanly of expressions, and I asked him to say something else instead. More importantly, I thought he should know what it was he was saying, so I told him what it was a slang expression for, so that he didn't think he was just talking innocently about squirrel dinner. He said he'd say "Oh, brother" instead, which I can't find any objection to. So now Mabel is saying "Aw, nuts," and I'm a little afraid to stop her for fear she'll decide to say it all the more.

As I may have mentioned before, I grew up convinced that rude words had been invented in the 1980s and my parents had never heard any of them. My father's worst expletives were Damn and Blast, and I got into a fair amount of trouble with my mother the day I tried to say either of those. When I was about 13, the word of choice at school seemed to be "crappy," and one day I used it at the dinner table. To immediate and shocking effect. I had no idea it meant anything other than, well, you know, crappy. Bad. Not nice.

Which is why I would rather Dash knew what he was saying. Then it can be his own decision, though of course I can let him know that some words are not for use around his elders and betters, or his youngers and more impressionables either.

Mabel has also taken to exclaiming "Good Lawd!" if she needs to express dismay. I suppose I need to start saying Good Gravy instead. Maybe with a side of Heavens to Betsy or Holy Mackeral. It would, after all, be amusing to hear her come out with those while sorting out the members of the dollhouse at school some day.

And then it occurred to me that perhaps fudge and fiddlesticks and sugar are things people say not because they're granny-types who never said anything stronger in their lives, but from many years of not-in-front-of-the-children last-second adjustments.

Verbose

If anyone knows how somebody visited this blog from the page of an engineering firm in Russia (this one, actually), I'd be fascinated to hear it. Blog stats are wierd and wonderful things, and I could spend far too much time obsessively refreshing them and wondering who my fan in the Philippines might be. (If it's you, hi! Stop by the comments and tell me all about yourself.)

In other news, we are in for a whole lot of trouble when Mabel gets older. (Okay, this isn't exactly news.) Her brother is as transparent as a sheet of glass - he is completely devoid of guile, and no matter what he's done, he'll always tell us about it. Mabel, in contrast, is full of shite, and I say that in the most loving way. She just told me that her granny just spoke to her on the phone and said that it's morning time so we can definitely turn on the TV. (She's not napping, and I couldn't get her to stay in her room, but at least, so help me, I can keep the TV off for an hour. Is that too much to hope for?)

B brought Mabel to school this morning, and drop-off was painless. When I picked her up at 11.30, though, she was a little teary. First she informed me, hiccupping, that "I'm not crying. My eyes are just a bit wet because I ... didn't get that little bike I wanted yesterday in the playground." Pure fabrication. Her teacher told me she'd spent most of the morning, once she got upset and decided it was time to miss me, talking about how Mummy hadn't done this, that, or the other. Miss L said, apologetically, "I do usually try to give weight to their concerns... but I think she's just... you know..."
"I know," I said."She just likes to talk."

She's playing with the dollhouse. Doll 1 just said to doll 2, wearily, "I don't have any patience for this." At moments like this, I'm really happy I don't give into my first instinct and swear like a particularly blasphemous sailor every time my kids drive me bananas.

In with the in-crowd

This morning I came down to find two children hiding behind the arm of the sofa.
"Boo!" shouted Monkey, as he jumped out.
"Boob!" shouted Mabel, belatedly. It must have reminded her of something. "I want your boobies!"

This is exactly why I never taught Monkey the proper word for some things. But Mabel picks up on words more quickly, and has more access to synonyms. (She loves synonyms. When B comes home and Monkey yells "Daddy's home!", Mabel counters with a joyous "My father!")

I just attended my first committee meeting for the nursery school. There was food. I was still hastily dabbing at the drip of spring-roll filling on my t-shirt moments before I had to introduce myself as the new housekeeping chair. Luckily, the position has more to do with delegation of cleaning tasks than actually performing them. Just as well.

Later, when I had to stand up before all the new and returning members and explain a little about the sub-committee positions, I felt I did fairly well and, you know, projected and stuff. It was only after I sat down that I remembered I'd said "hoovering" instead of "vacuuming." I hope they understood me.

Mabel had not napped today, and by the time I came home after two-and-a-half hours of meetings, she was still wide awake, watching cat videos on u-Tube with her father. (Monkey was sleeping peacefully.) I had been thinking that maybe it will be easier to get Mabel to sleep in a timely and non-boobular fashion once she gives up her naps, but perhaps not. Even after 13 hours straight awake, she took her sweet time to drop off, insisting on a totally fraudulent trip to the bathroom to string things out.

Well, I'll have a meeting once a month, so she'll have one extra reason to see me leaving the house without her, apart from pilates (weekly, maybe) and book club (monthly, maybe). It's almost as if I'm having a life of my own. Just a little.

Discs and discretion

Mabel sat up in bed at five mumble-mumble this morning and whispered to me: "Why do squirrels run so fast?"

Who knows how the mind of a two-year-old works? She gets fixated on the tiniest details when she's tired, like why the red boy (boy in red t-shirt, that is) fell down the slide, or why Monkey wanted to have his face painted, or why she herself wouldn't share her popcorn with her brother that one time. (These are the current preocupations. The slide-falling incident happened before Easter, the face painting was two weekends ago, and the popcorn was about two months ago. Her memory is long and elephantine.)

She was so nice at music and art class this morning; the good twin of the girl who hit everyone last week. My hopes are raised. Maybe it really was the tooth, and maybe the tooth has made it all the way out. (It was halfway out when I last put my finger in the lion's gaping jaws to check. I don't do that too often.)

She seems to have intuited, somehow, though I don't think I've expressly said it and certainly I try never to make a big thing of it, that nursing is something we do in private, when other people don't see us. We had visitors in the house a few weeks ago and Mabel dragged at my hand, saying "Come over here, Mummy. Come into the front room with me." When I finally went with her, she said "...so I can have mumeet here." She was so discreet that she didn't even want to mention it in public. Such diplomacy.

On the other hand, then we went to pick Monkey up from school last Friday. Mabel pointed at Miss P's breasts and said, "Oh, you have those too. Mummy has those. She gives me mumeet." So that was perhaps a tad less discreet. If we were ever in any doubt as to whether small children differentiate men and women by noticing longer hair or how they dress or any cultural significators, I think we can lay those thoughts to rest: Mabel looks straight for the bazongas.

We will not speak of the time she asked me to show her my nipple as we crossed the road. At least nobody was in earshot, becuase it's not as if she has some cutesy code word for nipple. Oh no.

Spitting image

Monkey is the image of his father, in many ways. People have been telling me that ever since he was born, but it's taken me a long time to see it. (Apart from their hairlines, which were clearly similar, one coming and one going.)

As a baby, Monkey looked to me the very picture of generic baby, with no particular identifying features. When I look in the mirror myself, I have always seen two eyes neither far apart nor close together, a nose in the middle that is not button-like, and a mouth that opens and closes as directed, under some brown hair. Beyond the fact that the skin is pale and the eyes are green, I can't tell you what I look like. So of course I can't see it if my children look like me, but you'd think I would recognise my husband in them.

And yet. Finally, now, when I look at photos of baby Monkey, I can fleetingly see what they were all talking about. It's the brow, the eyes, the slightly anxious expression in the few photos where he's not grinning delightfully for the camera.

 

I've just gone through all his baby photos twice, and this is the best example I can find. Please excuse the prison-issue pyjamas and escaping foot. (He's about seven months old here.) It's all but impossible to see the boy he is now in these pictures, too; now and then I catch a glimpse of a still-familiar expression in the eyes, but his face shape is so different, now that he's a pixie-chinned imp, that it's hard to reconcile the two.

See? Can you even tell it's the same child? Or is it just me who fails to see the obvious resemblance? (I, even.) (What does it mean when I can't even tell that my own firstborn looks like himself?)


But then. There's the matter of accents. One reason I could never countenance staying in America for long enough to have children here (way back when I thought I had a choice about this sort of thing) was that they would have American accents. How could I love a child with an American accent as my own? Wouldn't they seem like little, twangy, aliens? But life works in mysterious ways, and that's not how it has turned out.

For a long time I allowed myself to believe that my children didn't have any accents. (This is exactly the same delusion that many people have about themselves, or all denizens of the place they grew up in. They think, "We [Californians/Dubliners/Glaswegians] sound totally neutral and speak pure, correct English. Everyone else sounds all funny because they're saying it wrong.") Even last summer, when I overheard some mothers in a playground in England remark of my son, "Oh, he's a little American boy," I thought they might have it wrong. English people don't really understand Irish accents, you know. (Seriously. I spent a summer waitressing in London after college, and more than once had local customers ask me if I was American.)

But yes, they do both have American accents, though an American would probably detect a twinge of other in there. Mabel still says zed (and zebbra), but Monkey is fully assimilated and goes with zee and zeebra. Luckily for me, that's about as much regional specificity as I can detect in them, so as far as I'm concerned my children are the only totally accentless English speakers on the planet.

Flitsper it softly

You know what stems the flow of creative juices? (Phwoarr.) Children, that's what. As much as they give, in the form of adorable lisps and tales of bodily fluids, they take away, in the form of that son of mine who just won't fall asleep tonight and just called me upstairs again to tell me that one of his three little pigs is missing. Since these are cardboard pigs that he made at school LAST YEAR, I'm mostly surprised that two pigs, a wolf, and three houses are still around.

The other one is only asleep and missing the fun because she didn't nap today because she was too tired to fall asleep because she spent a lot of last night being wide awake, culminating in the moment when she went pink-pyjama'd pitter-patter straight past my bedroom door at 1.30am, whereupon I leapt out - I had been lying there unable to sleep, for some reason, who can imagine what; foreboding, maybe - and asked her where she thought she was going. "I was just going downstairs," she said, perfectly reasonably. Perhaps we have to get a gate for her bedroom doorway. Or a bell or something.

************

Last year at his annual checkup I was concerned enough about one of Monkey's verbal tics to ask for a referral to a speech therapist: he couldn't pronouce c and g, so that "car" was "tar" and "green" became "dreen". The doctor said it was common enough, but gave me a number to call, and I called and got the forms and filled them in and sent them off. By the time they rang me up and asked if I wanted to set up an appointment for an assessment, the problem had righted itself and I happily let the nice people know we wouldn't be needing their services.

So his remaining peculiarities of speech are endearing enough that I sort of hope he won't lose them for a while. He consistently spoonerizes remote control to kemote rontrol, and he can't say "whisper". The other day he told me me, "You know that word I can't say? Well, I just said it - listen: Flistper. Flistpfer. Fwipsper. Oh. Now I can't say it again."

Then again, he's coming up with some good new things, like saying "I stand corrected" at irrelevant moments. (I blame Aquaman, who's particularly pompous.) I think he will continue to amuse, just in new and unexpected ways.

Second-tier words

I've never been much of a swearer, certainly as far as Irish people go. I mean, we don't all swear like rock stars, but profanity is to a certain extent more of an everyday event in Ireland than it is in America. At least, it was when I lived there, and when I wasn't in the presence of my parents (who are just not the sort of people you would ever swear in front of: my Dad's worst possible words are Blast and Damn); but that was before I had kids.

Since becoming parents, we've both cleaned up our language to positively spotless: when riled I'll admit to letting fly a "sugar" or perhaps even "flip". (Oh, all right. Sometimes - three times a day or so - the four-year-old elicits a muttered "Jesus Christ". I'm not a saint. It's ironic, really, that the reason you don't swear is also the reason you most want to.)

But then there are the second-tier words: the ones that while not actually bad, are not in the first line of vocabulary you'd want to use in front of the queen. Or the nuns. Mostly those amusing little words like fart and snot. Such words were never required in my house: burping was about as inelegant as bodily functions got, once I was potty trained.

But this house is not my parents' house, and I want my children to be comfortable talking about what happens in the bathroom and elsewhere. Besides, I have a boy. And while I'm all for correct biological terms for body parts, I don't feel the need to make a meal of words and phrases like mucous and saliva and passing gas when there are perfectly good and simpler words available. As a bonus, it's pretty cute when a two-year-old comes up to you and says "I'm 'notty. I need a tissue," or answers your query as to whether she's pooey with a nonchalant "No, I just farting."

A walk with Mabel

Okay. You need to go to sleep. You keep running away when I try to nurse you down in your room, so it's the Ergo for you, Missy. Into the stroller, Monkey, you'll have to come too, because I can't leave you behind.

[Five minutes later, the wrong one is asleep. I curse (inwardly, natch). Mabel is still chattering blithely.]

- What that, Mummy? What that noise? What that, Mummy? You say something, Mummy? What you say? What you saying?
- Nothing, Mabel. I didn't say anything.
- What that, Mummy?

[I strain to hear whatever it is she's talking about. She hears all the little background noises that my ears are so used to just cancelling out, so I really have to think about it.]

- I think it's a drill.
- Man? Man with a drill? What man doing, Mummy?
- Making holes. Go to sleep, Mabel.
- I can't see man. Man making holes? With a drill? There's a doggy. Look, Mummy, see the doggy? Doggy say woof woof. You sing the song about the doggy in the window woof woof woof? You sing the song, Mummy?
- No, Mabel. No more songs. Go to sleep.

[I wonder how I can bludgeon her into silence. Luckily, she's on my back so the logistics are too awkward. I slog along.]

- ...The maid was in the garden, counting out her money... You sing the song for me, Mummy? You sing the blackbirds baked in a pie? 'Winkle 'winkle 'ittle how I wonder what you like a diamond in the 'ky... Can I sing a song for you, Mummy? I sing ABCDEFGLMNOP, Mummy?
- I'm not talking to you any more, Mabel. It's nap time. Put your head down and go to sleep.
- What you say, Mummy? You not talking to me any more?
- No. [arggh]
- You not talking? I go to sleep? I run away so we have to go for a walk?

[She puts her head down. A few seconds of silence. We pass the women with the dogs and one of them says "Hi." I try to look polite and manage to muster a grimace, instead of taking out a shiv and silently stabbing her, repeatedly, for what's about to happen. Head comes up.]

- What that, Mummy? Those doggies? That the doggy behind the fence? Say woof woof woof?
- [Seethe]

Conversations with my family

Me: Monkey ran a half-mile race yesterday. He ran the whole thing!
My mother: He did not!
Me: I know! He did. I couldn't do that.
My mother: No. And you wouldn't want to.
Me: ...um
My mother: Sure, that wouldn't be good for you.

Well, I am a delicate flower. Then she went on to tell me how she'd won all the races when she was at school. So evidently he gets this athletic bent from her, not from his marathon-running father. Never mind. So long as we all know that I inherited my father's non-athletic genes and I'd better not try running anywhere, that's fine.

****

Mabel, looking at a photo of me doing a cartwheel: That not Mummy, that a lady.
Me: I suppose I haven't taught you yet that a lady always keeps her knees together.

****

Monkey, from the other room: What can I do upside down?
Me: What?
Monkey: What can I do when I'm upside down?

I know, without looking, that he's standing on his head on the sofa, watching tv. I'm pretty sure I used to do this too. Somehow, just sitting down on my backside was never interesting enough.

****

Me, reading an AA Milne poem to Mabel, expecting a comment on this line because she's been playing with her George the chimpanzee this morning: "... George was a goat, and his beard was yellow..."
Mabel, indignant, looking at the picture: That not George. That a moose.

Sound and vision

These days, Mabel's opening gambit is "I wuv you too." Which doesn't leave me anywhere to go, really, except a big hug and a kiss.

Lately, sentences such as "Maybe Daddy can do it," responses like "Because I need to," and double-barrelled sentiments the like of "I want to open it so I can drink it" have become so commonplace that I've almost stopped noticing that my not-yet-2-year-old (22 months next Saturday, people) is conversing like an old hand. One day while we were away I offered her a pencil to draw with. She looked up at me calculatingly and said: "How...how...how..." I knew something new was on the way. "How about a pen?"


*******

Oh boy. I've just looked at the forecast and noticed that after a week of 90-somethings, Saturday's forecast high is 77F. I will be all over that - especially as I'll be (wo)manning the school's booth at the Labor Day Festival from 1 to 3 that day. I really hope it's still true by then.

*******

On Sunday morning, as we were being magically transported cafe-wards on the divine escalator of those who worship at IKEA, I noted that my glasses were so scratched (only from repeatedly cleaning them on my t-shirt, not putting them down face-first on tables or throwing them in with fighting cats) that I should probably just get laser surgery. I wasn't entirely serious, but on the other hand it has to happen sometime. I've always thought I'd do it eventually, when the price came down and the procedure was better, and maybe we're there.

At some point it becomes economical to spend the money in one fell swoop instead of replacing expensive glasses every few years, not to mention the incidental expense of contact lenses that I hardly ever wear. (Since moving to the US I've found it more and more difficult to wear my lenses, even when I have the wateriest kind available. Either the climate here is too dry, or maybe I've just worn them for too long. I did well out of contact lenses for all of my 20s, when my ego and I needed them most, but they don't really work for me any more.)

And in a way, now that it's no longer about vanity, I think maybe I could let myself do it. (Vanity is the wrong word there. It's not that I spent hours in front of the mirror thinking about how great I looked. I spent hours in front of the mirror trying on everything I owned and going back to the one I'd started out with in an attempt to look reasonably nice. Just like every other girl does.) But nowadays there's no time to look in the mirror. The door it hangs on swings wide before I've caught a glance, and I have other things to do. If I don't have poppy seeds stuck between my teeth and if any visible stains on my t-shirt might plausibly have been made after I put it on this morning, then I'm probably good to go. I'm only going to the playground anyway. I almost like my glasses these days because they hide my wrinkles - at least from me. Without them my face feels a little naked.

Looking at our insurance, I might be able to do it for as little as $850 per eye. At this point, the longer I wait the less economical it gets, if I just keep buying new glasses instead. But part of me, though not usually icked out by medical things, can't help being a tad ooged by the clockwork-oranginess of the idea of having my eyelids pronged open while they slice bits of my cornea open and fire lasers at me. (Fine: (a) I haven't read the book, and (b) I know that they don't have to slice the cornea, necessarily. Leave me to my literary hyperbole, please, even if it's inaccurate.) And there can be side effects, and sometimes it just doesn't work, and heck, I only have one pair of eyes, and they're crap, but you know I can forget about that most of the time. Maybe it's not worth it just to not have to look through a faint blur of scratches all day.

Anyone out there care to weigh in? Should I do it?

Words

I'm reading NurtureShock, at last, having bought it as a birthday present to myself. (It's not in the library yet, and they're discussing it chapter by chapter at Ask Moxie, and it's been on my wishlist for ages, and it was reduced, and so on.) I skipped ahead to the chapter on speech development yesterday, because I'm sure that Mabel's precocious verbalization will be commented on while we're away, and I wanted to know what I'm talking about in response.

Call me over-reactive, but somehow, while I'm proud as anything of her speedy speech, something inside me takes any comment on it as an unspoken criticism of Monkey's more unhurried development in this area way back when he was this age. Which clearly is ridiculous, as if anyone knows or remembers or cares, since he's chatterboxapaloozaville these days and has been for quite a while, but hey, I'm their mother. Love one, you'd better be damn sure you love them both.

Anyway, I wondered if the book would turn up any clues as to why my kids have developed so differently speechwise. They were both active babies, both early crawlers, both bad sleepers (were? what's this past tense, paleface?) - but as I may have mentioned, here she is on the cusp of 21 months and talking in sentences, whereas at the same age he was just about to have his long-awaited vocabulary explosion and go from 5 words to 50 in a week or two. Which was perfectly normal for his age - it's not that he was slow, though I felt as if he was as I watched other kid after other kid come out with two or three or five words at a time. Anyway, why the disparity? Did we do something differently? What could the much-lauded experts tell me?

Well, the book says (to quote my mother, who was ususally talking about Dr Spock) that to help a baby learn to speak, you must not only speak to them but also react favourably to their speech-like vocalizations when they babble back to you. So if you touch or kiss or respond to your four-month-old when she makes a voiced vowel sound, rather than just a cry or a yelp or a bleat or whatever other sounds babies make, you're showing her that this is the path to take. As they get older, babies learn words better if they hear more than one person repeat them, and with object motion to help them connect the word with the thing they're looking at. So you wave a ball in front of your 11-month-old's face and say "ball" in a sing-song voice, and then get a couple of other people to do it, and hey presto, they learn and repeat the word "ball".

Mabel consults the book

As the second child, Mabel's experience was obviously different from Monkey's, since she had him right there in her face from day one, yammering on about Spider-Man or asking for apple juice or whatever he happened to be saying. But I can't believe we responded any more or differently to her than we did to him at an early age.

So I realised that it's simply down to their personalities. As I said, they were both active and crawled early, but Monkey walked at 14 months and Mabel at 10 and a half. He's a cautious kid, for all his crazy antics - whereas she's just crazy and anticky. It's not just her reckless, unscientific youth that makes her walk straight into the pool without stopping to wonder where this water might be going as it rises to her neck and above; or climb to the top of the highest swirly slide and come straight down, hair buzzing with static, mouth wide with laughter - she's that sort of person. And when it comes to talking, she just goes for it and says the word.

Monkey's receptive language was all there from an early age, and just as he was such a great crawler that he saw no need to walk, he was also such a good communicator - what with the pointing and the nodding and the shaking of the head - that he got all he wanted for a long time without needing to put words to it. He talked when he was good and ready, and that's how he is. He'll read, and swim, and ride a bike and all those other things, when he's good and ready and sure he's up for it too, and not on anyone else's schedule.

Famming goos

Mabel talks in sentences of six or seven words now, and conjugates and uses pronouns and all sorts. This morning she said, "Maybe Daddy took it." She used the word "earlier" correctly last weekend, and will answer "because" when you ask why. (She's not so clear on what comes after because.)

At the crack of dawn the other morning she could hear B and Monkey downstairs and got up to join them, leaving me metaphorically in the dust. (Or for dead, whichever.) I rolled over and buried my head a little deeper in the pillow, as she cheerily announced, "Bye, Mummy ... have fun."

We don't have a huge number of (non Disney or Pixar) kid DVDs, but somehow we acquired two of the nauseating songs and animals and children dressed in "fashions" from the early 90s (why does that not sound as long ago as it is?) type baby DVDs, and I grudgingly have to admit that someone must have really done their research, because it seems babies really like them. Mabel has discovered the Baby Animals one, and the other day was transfixed by the baby flamingoes section. Why flamingoes? I don't know - personally I find the baby lion cubs a lot cuter, but she has suddenly started to demand the "Famming goos" at all hours. When we're sick of the DVD we bring out the big word book, which contains a picture of a famming goo, but after that she's on her own.

Wait till I put on Potty Power for her. I shudder in anticipation.

Parrot

I started this a while ago; here's what I had to say then:

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At almost 18 months, Miss's vocabulary is growing apace: she's starting to put two words together, though usually one is a proper noun, so it's something like: "Dolly back. Mummy back? Daddy back? Baby back?" [Cue me going "I want my baby back, baby back..."] And then I have to reassure her that yes, we all have backs. At least, I think that's what she wants to know. It's amazing to have this tiny insight into the workings of her mind. When we were in Boston she enjoyed riding the trains, and one evening she got stuck on repeat when she was too tired to think, and kept telling me, "Chugga 'way. Chugga 'way. Chugga 'way." Yes, Baby, the chugga-chugga has gone away. We'll see another tomorrow. Go to sleep.

But apart from that, she'll also repeat random words when she hears them. Like this:

Driving home, telling Monkey about cars.
Monkey says: "This is a Subaru Outback."
Little voice from other carseat: "Sooboo Ow-bak."

This evening B went out to the mailbox to get the post (as we Irishers say).
Miss ran after him: "Daddy? Pote?"

Sometimes she transposes the sounds in a word, so that for stone she says "no" and for miaow she says "yam".

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So that was then, just about a month ago. Now she's talking in sentences, with pronouns. She's conjugating, for goodness sake.
(Seriously. She saw a bird: "Birdie."
Me: Yes, there's a bird. Did the bird fly away?
Her: Birdie flied away.)

Some of it is still parrot work, like when Monkey says "I want it," and she starts up, just to bug him: "Ah wan it." But more and more she's putting words together herself, and practicing, and asking me for words and repeating them to herself, filing them away:

Me: Did you get an owie on your elbow?
Her: Ebow.

Me: Will we look for the cat outside?
Her: Cat owside. Where cat? I dunno. (Shakes head concernedly.)

Her days are filled with looking for cats, seeing birdies, hearing woof-woofs, finding Dolly, trying to wake people up (with a very clear "Wake up", as of yesterday, while she jumped on her sleeping brother's head), asking for more Cheerios, for milk, for a waffle straight from the freezer ("code waffle"), for fizzy apple juice, for a pea (or ten) to throw on my new floor. If you start the alphabet song she will chime in at the beginning of each phrase: "Abc...hij.....qr...".

She's clearly a prodigy. I don't even want to mention the fact that she seems to be spontaneously toilet training, lest I jinx that. But I think the universe owes me one on that front, so maybe it's true.

Using words, resting eyes

Last night I uploaded a post I'd written a while ago and not posted for some reason, about Miss's expanding vocabulary. In the three weeks or so since then, it's amazing how many more words she has - I actually asked her to "use your words" to tell me what she needed today. (It didn't work, of course.) Unlike her brother, who would never repeat a word just for the sake of it, she's a little parrot, quite happy to attempt anything. The other night there was a clamour for more Blues Clues from Child One, and suddenly Child Two came running over to me hooting "Boo coo, boo coo."

I can't even start to list all her words, but thinking about just food words, there's waffle, peas, cheese, bread, drink, juice (not that she gets it), sandwich, broccoli, bagel, apple, strawberry, blueberry, cookie ... okay, so sometimes you need the context to know she's saying it, but I'm still impressed.

We're all a bit at sixes and sevens these days as far as sleep goes. I'd love to blame it on the missing hour, but it's more to do with nap transitions - Miss from two naps to one, and Monkey to giving up his naps altogether. So some days she drops off for a quick catnap before we pick him up from school, and then naps late or (argh) not at all; some days he naps and goes to bed late, others he skips the nap and goes to bed early.

All I can do is offer the opportunity - which for us means going for a walk around 1pm with him in the stroller and her in the Ergo - and if they take it they get the nap and if not, they don't. But there's no consistency, so it's hard to plan anything: an afternoon playdate or even a trip to the post office might be sabotaged by someone who didn't nap, is unexpectedly napping, or can't be taken out in a car for fear they'll fall asleep. Yesterday Monkey had no nap, so he went to sleep at 7pm - which meant he was awake at 5 this morning, which has led to a nice early nap this afternoon, which I hope will bring us to a reasonable bedtime and a reasonable waking tomorrow, but who knows.

Monkey never actually admits to napping. The most you'll get him to say is that he rested his eyes. Here he is resting his eyes in the stroller one day last summer.

Numptiness

Miss comes for a walk strapped on my front in the Ergo, clutching a still-damp wipe that she insisted on grabbing while I changed her. She keeps stuffing it down my cleavage, then producing it again with a manic chuckle.

At some point in his linguistic journey towards becoming the chatterbox he is today, Monkey started to say "Uh-huh" in response to everything, as if to say "Yes, yes, of course, tell me something I don't know." Miss says "Ohhhh," in the tone of one who has just had everything explained to her satisfaction, thank you very much. It's a lot more gratifying to the explainer.

This evening as I was trying to persuade her to get sleepy, she kept repeating "Goggles" (looking at the table behind me, where there were indeed a pair of goggles) and "Go-go" (beating her chest a little because this is her word for gorilla). She was getting agitated, and eventually I said, "Yes, those are goggles. Go-go is different, that's a gorilla."

She replied, "Ohhhh," in a very relieved tone, as if it was all clear now and she could stop worrying about it. And put her head down and went to sleep. (Well, not quite.)

Then there's "Nump." If you're singing Insy Winsy Spider and you get to the end, Nump means "Again please." If you're re-hooking your bra cup because she stopped nursing, an indignant Nump means "Where do you think you're going with that? I was just taking a break." If you're trying to quickly note that you are out of Cheerios yet again, Nump means "Gimme that pen and paper so that I can scribble all over your shopping list and render it illegible." It's a great word. We should all use it.

Monkey was being threatened with tickles, and then being tickled. Miss came over to us, pointed at her own pyjama-clad tummy, and said, "Nump?"
"What, you want to be tickled too?"
"Yup."
Happy to oblige.

Vocabulary

Excuse me if I'm a little distracted. While child one is slumbering peacefully on the sofa - as well he should since he woke at 5am, the sod - child two is buzzing around, arms windmilling, pausing now and then to find a new hat (the door to the coat closet fell off / was removed for safety / is no longer there, so the hats are right there for her to grab at will, scattering mittens as she goes), playing with everything at once and telling me "ap-pul, ap-pul" as she points to the apple in the big word book. Now she's got the kid camera out and is saying "jheezz". It's very entertaining but it's not what you'd call taking a nap, exactly.



She's having one of those vocabulary explosions that her brother didn't have till he was 20 months or so. In the past couple of days she's added ball, apple, cheese, down, hi, no, and go-go (for gorilla) to her previous Mummy and Daddy (interchangeable), bye, yes, up, ba for bath and de for dog. I may be going out on a limb here, but I think she'll be an early talker. She also says things that sound suspiciously like "go away" and "mine", but let's give her the benefit of the doubt on those.

She's not sleeping very well just now; I've decided to call it the 15-month sleep regression, but I'm pretty sure the talking has something to do with it. I'll think she's finally dropped off but then she'll lift her head and shout "ball".

(In other news, I think I've made five different sorts of muffins in the past week, since The Snows began. Plain chocolate chip, modified chocolate chip (I used part wholewheat flour and banana baby yogurt instead of plain yogurt; I was at the end of my supplies after Snow Round I), choc choc chip, banana butterscotch, and probably something else I can't remember. As well as banana buttermilk pancakes, a loaf of yeast bread (still not rising properly; must keep trying), french toast, chewy seedy apricot bars, and, you know, dinners.)