Sometimes it's something unfortunate, like his attempts to copy the little rabbit in The Runaway Bunny who says "Aw, shucks."
Sometimes it's adorable, like how his eyes lit up the other day in Sam's Club when I put a jar of Nutella into the cart: "Tella! Tella!"
And sometimes, it's pretty funny. Like yesterday, as we were getting ready to go meet another mom and her little one at Barnes & Noble. The little girl shares a name with my sister, so to keep from confusing him, I told him that we were going to see a girl. "Can you say 'girl'?" He thought for a moment, wrinkled up his nose at me, and carefully pronounced, "Grrrr-lla." Great. Girls are 'gorillas.' He proceeded to call the sweet little thing "grrrlla" every time he wanted her attention, usually as he was about to take a toy away from her. This kid.
There are still a lot of things he says that make no sense, and I'm sure it'll be that way for a while. There are also the things that he has a word for, and we know what it means, but it doesn't sound anything like the real word and we have no idea how he came up with it. "Nggg" is coat. "Kung" is book of nursery rhymes. "Baaan" is thermometer.
It's encouraging that he is trying so hard to communicate with us, right? I don't remember this language-development stage with my younger siblings; I was away at school when the youngest was learning to talk, and the others were too long ago. Little Bear gets so frustrated when he's trying to tell me something and I can't figure it out, and he doesn't understand "what?" or "say it again" yet. He just looks at me impatiently or walks away. Maybe soon more of his words will make more sense.
My little sister said "goos" for squirrel. We still have no idea.
ReplyDeleteWhen she was quite a bit older than Little Bear is now, it did help to say, "Can you describe it?" So, to make up an example, if you didn't know what "goos" meant you could ask her and she'd say it has a fluffy tail and climbs trees. (Impatiently, as if you were very dense not to know that.)