language development

Photos: Eleanor around the time that she started talking in real English words (although she had been communicating in full paragraphs of her own language for months before!)

Cap's sister and brother-in-law moved to a new house today with their one-year-old daughter. I spent the morning at home with Eleanor and Rose and each of us got a much needed bath and our nails clipped! Wahoo! Around 1:00 I packed everyone into the car and drove to the new house to join the crew who were helping them move boxes. While Cap and the other manly men shuttled boxes and furniture around the State, the women folk stayed in the house watching the kiddies and unpacking kitchen-ware. How very quaint, eh? The remnants of Hurricane Ernesto were evident by the driving mist that kept up most of the day - which actually made it quite nice to be inside being all domestic.

Around 7pm Cap, Eleanor, Rose, and I drove home. Eleanor talked NON-STOP for the entire hour-long car ride. But, whereas normally this would be just too much for me to take, tonight she was completely entertaining to listen to. She told us that the moon (which she could see out her window) was a circle and she talked to us about "nighttime coming" which is something she seems to be completely enthralled with lately. She said "oh, I'm so seepy (sleepy) I have to get in bed!" which amazed me because she is normally so ANTI-sleeping. She said that she wanted to go up into the clouds of the beautiful sunset and so we pretended to take an airplane rideAround 7pm, with tummies full of post-moving-pizza, Cap, Eleanor, Rose, and I up into the clouds. She made me pretend to take the moon out of the sky and throw it on the floor and then the moon got sad and I had to pick it up again and hold it in my hands to make it feel better and then throw it back up into the sky. She made up a whole story about the car needing new lights so that we could see the road and going to the store to buy new lights and put them in a box in the cart and that we needed to find someone who works at the store and that we were going to pay with a creditcard. All this wonderfully elaborate talking got me thinking about how fascinating her language development has been!

I thought this might be a good time to jot down some of the great words that Eleanor has said over the past year or so.

First word: APPLE - she said this loud and clear, in two beautifully perfect syllables, sometime last December.

From then on the words came fast and furious but many of my favorite words are the ones that she mispronounced so cutely. In typing these out I'm sure they will just look like boring old baby-talk, but for those of you who know Eleanor you have to picture her sweet little voice and how seriously she would say things like ree rees (raisins) or tee tees (cookies). The best part of it is that she would say full proper sentences but then throw in these funny baby words. There was a time when she would wake us up every morning and say "Mommy, Daddy, I want to go to the titchen (kitchen) to have ree ree bran, with some moke (milk), in a Daddy bowl (one of the big bowls), and a poon (spoon)." EVERY morning she would go through this ritual. It was so sweet that it would make up for the hours of sleep that she had made me miss the night before.

But then she figured out that ree ree was really pronounced "raisin" and one day she corrected me when I referred to them as ree rees. The same goes for how she would say "Nama" instead of Grandma, and then one day corrected me when I said "Nama."

So, for posterity here are some of the words that are soon to be, or already have been lost to correct pronounciation:

• pit-up (spit-up, as in "Rose did some pit-up, Mommy")
• buttyfly (butterfly)
• bayoon (balloon as in "I want a boo bayoon from tadowjows {trader joe's}, Mommy")
• her very own name... Elno (Eleanor)
• "Mommy pick you up" instead of "Mommy, pick me up"
• peakows (speakers)
• pinkows (sprinkles, as on ice cream)
• boo (blue)
• whee (swing), which turned to "whing"
• Yiz (Liz)
• emeyee bowd (emery board)
• "the beep" (smoke detector) which became "smoke potetow" (smoke protector, but she means smoke detector)
• papi (passie, as in pacifier)
• moojish (music)
  

That's all I can think of because it is past 11pm and my eyes are shutting against my will.
Night night.