Archive for July 28th, 2009
Oh, the words. The talking. The absence of quiet in the car, the house, the everywhere.
I worried. I thought she wasn’t talking enough or that she should be a little further (verbally) along by now.
Not so much worried anymore.
She’s stringing words together into real sentences. A grammarian she is not (“you sit me pease, Mama” translates to “Can I sit on your lap, please?”) but I’ve no doubt she’ll be there in no time – but I hope not too quickly because her phrasing is so darn cute right now. She sometimes gets in such a hurry to speak that the words tumble out incorrectly and and I become Dada before she realizes she’s made a mistake and corrects herself (“UH-OH, no Dada you Mama!). She knows that “pease” will get her almost anything. She knows that potty (“pot-pot”) makes the world come to an abrupt halt which means that she tries it whenever we make her do something she doesn’t want to do – like sit in her chair and eat or ride in the stroller. She asks me every single morning if Dada will pick her up from daycare and and we play our version of I Spy for the entire duration of our morning commute (“I see trees, I see sky, I see cars, I see truck, I see dog, I see poo-pul (people), etc.”). Every siren is a fire truck and I never realized how many airplanes there actually are in our skies (duh – since we live near an airport and an Air Force base) until she began to point them out to me every single time she spotted one. It goes without saying that everything in our house except Daddy’s truck and Mama’s car are “mine.” Speaking of seeing…if she hears a car horn or the microwave beeps then she doesn’t hear it – she “sees” beep-beeps.
She’s learned to say yes, finally. Well, really she says yeah – which drives me nuts. She does a long drawn out “uhhhhhhh” before answering when you ask her a question that she has to think about. Cute, but slightly annoying. Dada is becoming Daddy and she tried to turn Mama into Mommy which I nipped in the bud by refusing to answer her and then asking her what my name is about 9 million times. She’s knows that Daddy’s other name is J and she will call him that if she’s yelling at him from another room. (Oops, guess I should watch that.) It’s a bit surreal to hear your own verbal foibles repeated back to you by the sponge-y 2 year old – as evidenced by her saying “Huh?” every single time we speak to her. I blame that on J as he’s half deaf anyway and this is his standard response to being spoken to. He’s even gotten annoyed by it and has in turn quit doing it too. Thank heavens. Now we just have to break her from doing that and the “Hmph” under her breath that she picked up from me.
Her speech is very clear most of the time although there are still words that we don’t get – which then turns into a game of 20 questions while we try to figure it out before she gets angry about our lack of toddler language translation skills. She amazes me with some of the words she says. She can say and identify a number of geometrical shapes but still can’t fit them in the shape sorter easily (nor can I do this either – spatial relations are not my strong suit). She knows her color names but mostly wants everything to be called pink.
Did someone say pink? Yep, she’s an all pink girly girl. Loves nail polish on her toes, hairbows for about 30 minutes, gives herself a swipe of powder on the nose anytime she can get hold of my makeup brush, and covets chap stick above all else in the world. Purses and shoes are her thing – and she has plenty of each. Oh, and she loves swishy skirts.
Not only is she talking…but she is SINGING. All the time – loudly – and insists, no – make that demands, that you join in. She sings her ABC’s all the way through, she sings Baa Baa Black Sheep, she sings – well, let’s just say she sings everything since it would take me too long to list them all. She sings in the car, in the store, in the house, in the shower, outside, inside, at the beach, and anywhere else she feels like it. Thus J and I sing a lot more now, too. In public and with no regard to how bad we sound or how silly we look doing the hand motions to Twinkle Twinkle Little Star in the middle of T.arget. I think singing like this is good for the soul and I’m glad Ava has freed us up to do this even if people do look at me like I’m nuts sometimes.
She’s 90% independent toddler with just the right amount of mama’s baby mixed in. What a great age the 2′s have been for us so far.
