dynamic elf

I've been delaying writing the Natalie language update for long enough that she's gone through several distinct stages while I've been putting it off.

After she'd been in daycare for a little while, she and I had the following conversation:

N: Shelly says 'no push'.
Me: No pushing other people?
N: Yes.
Me: That's a good rule. People don't like it when you push them.
N: Arelhy says 'no pushing'. But Shelly says 'no push'.
Me: ...They both mean the same thing. I like to say 'no pushing', but I think 'no push' would mean the same thing.
N: I like to say 'no push'.

Of course you do, kiddo. It's weirder.

Then, for a while, she would come home and report on how other kids in her cohort said stuff; for example, I know Akeem (aka "Akeem-deem") says 'ogurt', and Anais calls her 'Nanni'. For a while, she experimented with dropping the g off of -ing words (hi, kcatalyst!), but when we didn't seem to care, she put them back on.

A month or two ago, she started experimenting with shortening words to see what we'd understand. This led to a lot of utterances like "MAH KERREH! MAH KERREH! That means 'mommy I want you to carry me'. MAH KERREH!" Anyway, she does that a lot, still -- she'll say something inscrutable and short, and I'll have to ask her what it means, and she'll patiently explain it to me and then repeat the short form. It's pretty playful -- I mean, it has to be. I've gotten pretty comfortable with the world where I understand everything she says without even trying, so when she tries to make it harder for me I don't have to work hard to play dumb. Really, if any of my peers said the weird truncated things she says, I would also be confused. It usually goes like this:

N: I wah my shor.
Me: ...what?
N: I want my shorts. I wah my shor.
Me: Um, okay, here are your shorts.

Often, when I pick her up at the end of the day, I will get a cute little anecdote from one of the teachers that amounts to "Natalie said something situationally and socially appropriate". Friday's, for example, was this: "Natalie was swinging a toy around and accidentally bonked someone, so she stopped swinging it and said, 'Oh, I'm sorry! Oh, did I hit you? I'm really sorry!'" So, I mean, I laugh, because it's cute, but why is it cute that she knew what to say? It's the same thing when I say "ouch, that really hurt!" when I stub my toe or whatever and she gets that superconcerned face and says, soothingly, "I know, mommy, I know. I know. It'll be okay."

There's a big balancing act in here -- right now, one of my biggest parenting challenges is figuring out how to expect the right amount from her. She can sound older than she is, so I have to remember that she can't really, say, follow a logical chain of reasoning several steps down the line before speaking. Her attention span is definitely that of a 2-year-old. She likes running around and banging stuff and shrieking and talking about poop. But on the other hand, as dilletante was saying to me last night, we like expecting a lot of her, because she so often lives up to our expectations, and if we didn't give her room to do that, then she wouldn't have the chance.

Now, the reason I started posting in the first place, which at this point might be a little anticlimactic! A thing that we've actually been trying to get her to do is be more explicit in her descriptions of stuff, because this conversation gets old after try #100:

N: What's that?
Me: What?
N: That! What's that?
Me: Which thing do you want to know about?
N: THAT thing!

And, slowly, she has been getting it. It's wonderful to watch her refine her descriptions. Now, when you ask 'which thing', she will usually say something like 'the white thing on the counter over there'. She gets this expression:



on her face, which looks for all the world like how I feel when I'm trying to express something complicated in a language I don't speak very well. And that must be EXACTLY WHAT SHE IS FEELING! Which is awesome.

But the best thing of all to hear is when she searches and searches and can't come up with a circumlocution or anything and has to just use the best-fit word available to her at the time. Two things she said to me this weekend while I was carrying her:

"Your face isn't round, mommy. It's more ... .... SHAPED."

and

"It feels like rain. The sky is grey and the air is... ... the air is heavy."

It didn't rain that night, but it DID feel like rain, and if I could have I would have opened up the heavens myself to pour rain down on us right that instant.