Category Archives: talking

Word Girl

1 Reply

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.” 
Mabel eating a s'more
Possibly a little yummier than bum

Just walk

1 Reply

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.

————————–

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

2 Replies

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

Leave a reply

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

4 Replies

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 dan gewous.
- [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

Leave a reply

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

Leave a reply

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

Leave a reply

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

3 Replies

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

2 Replies

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.