A Beautiful Mind

Unlike some 2-year-old boys who tend to be the strong, silent type, my son is a talker. He talks night and day. (Literally. He even talks in his sleep.) He has an impressive vocabulary for his age, and he is fascinated by new words. And the bigger, the better. “Humongous,” “articulated,” “stabilizers,” and “breakable” have all had their turn on his list of favorite words. But the top of the list by far this week is the word “beautiful.”

I’m not sure exactly what appeals to him about the word “beautiful.” Perhaps it’s that he can say it quite clearly. Perhaps it’s the sheer number of things to which it can be applied. If I dress up to go out to dinner with my husband – heck, if I put on earrings – my son informs me that I look beautiful. He likes to snitch diaper wipes and use them to clean off his toy trucks, telling me, “Mama, now my snowplow is beautiful,” or “I have a beautiful garbage truck.” While watching an episode of Curious George, he will announce, “George is a beautiful monkey,” or “That is a beautiful big yellow hat.” When he puts on his own yellow play hard hat, he asks, “Do you like my beautiful hat?”

It amazes me when he understands how a word can be used in a context in which he has never heard it before. I’m sure that when he’s seen me dressed up, my husband has told him, “Mama looks beautiful!” And somehow from that, apparently he’s figured out that “beautiful” can refer to an improvement over day-to-day looks; hence his application of the word to toy trucks that have been freshly washed. And he understands that “beautiful” is something special, so he describes Curious George as beautiful (a term I’ve never heard him apply to his stuffed monkeys) because he knows that George is an unusual and special monkey. Some things that are especially dear are called “beautiful,” so his beloved yellow hard hat is beautiful.

Occasionally, I am privileged to hear him talking through a new word as if to figure out how it works. He tends to be rough with toys and dishes, tossing them around carelessly, so I’ve cautioned him that some things are “breakable” so he needs to be extra-careful with them. I pointed out that Mama's coffee mug is breakable. I told him that he can’t step on his smaller toys because they’re breakable. I explained that some things in our house, like vases and candlesticks, are kept on high shelves because they’re breakable. So yesterday when we were having lunch with my father-in-law, my son went around the table carefully identifying various items by their breakability status: “My [plastic sippy] cup is not breakable. Pappy’s [glass] cup is very breakable. Mama’s [glass] cup is very breakable. My [paper] plate is not breakable. That [pointing to a glass vase of flowers] is very breakable.” It’s quite impressive to me that he was able to figure out, entirely on his own, that things made of plastic are usually not breakable and things made of glass almost always are. And when I warned him not to touch a figurine on the windowsill, he immediately understood why, asking, "Oh, this is breakable?"

His fascination with any particular word or concept also seems to help him fit it into the correct context because he uses it at every possible opportunity. When the word “happy” was the word of the week, he would ask me, “Mama is happy?” at least a dozen times a day. (Often out of genuine curiosity but occasionally out of pure hopefulness after he had misbehaved.) And he would inform me, “Ryan is happy!” at least a dozen more. My favorite example of his use of the word happy has to be from a few nights ago when he was being naughty right at bedtime and got sent to bed without his usual bathtub playtime. I was listening to him on the monitor and couldn’t help but laugh as he laid in bed and tearfully protested, “I want to be happy in my tubby!”

The idea of sleeping and being awake is another recent interest, although he applies it to trucks and buildings more often than actual people. When I come down for breakfast, he rarely fails to ask, “Mama, did you have a good sleep?” He announces, “I had a good sleep!” after every nap. When he asks if we’re going to church and we tell him, “Not today,” he inquires if the church is sleeping. On days when we don’t have gymnastics class, he tells us that gymnastics is sleeping. If I try to clarify things by telling him that the gym isn’t sleeping, he just isn’t going there today, he nods and says knowingly, “Oh, gymnastics is NOT sleeping. Gymnastics is awake!” If we pass a work site where he had seen some kind of construction vehicle within the past month and it’s not there, he announces that the backhoe/excavator/skid steer/bucket truck must be sleeping.

I love introducing him to new words, and I love watching him try them out, wrangle with their meaning, and quickly master them in every context. It is, as he might say, a beautiful thing.

I'm Comin' Up

At my daughter’s 6-month pediatrician appointment last week, while the doctor was examining her, she grabbed onto the doc’s arm and hauled herself up into a kneeling position. The doc was a bit surprised and asked how long she’d been doing that. I told her about a week and joked that we had to lower the crib mattress so she didn’t launch herself over the side some morning. The doc then told me that most kids don’t get to that stage till more like 9 months. I guess she’d really be amazed if she saw my daughter pulling herself up to a standing position and creeping a step or two around the coffee table today.

Right now, if I put her on the floor in the middle of the room but stand next to her, she immediately grabs my leg and does a “hand over hand” crawl up my leg until she’s up on her knees. (She hates Mondays when I take my son to gymnastics and wear my slippery Spandex yoga pants.) She’s discovering which objects in every room are useful to pull herself up on. If we bring her into the living room, she crawls right over to the coffee table, which is short enough that she can reach up and grab the edge to pull herself up. She’s frustrated in the kitchen because the chair rungs are too low and the cabinet knobs are too high for her to pull up on. Any body part of any human being in a room with her is considered fair game – if you’re sitting on the floor you may find a small warm body pulling herself up your back or grabbing your knees; if you’re walking past a pair of small hands may grab at your ankles; if you lie down you’ll be scaled like Mt. Everest.

When you think about it, the motivation for a baby to get as much height as possible has to be astounding. All the most interesting action is happening far above her head. Up to now, she’s been totally dependent on someone picking her up to be able to see any higher than about knee level. We have a booster chair with an attached tray on the floor where my son eats his lunch, and if my daughter is crawling around while he’s eating, she immediately comes over, grabs onto the tray with both hands, and hauls herself up to peep at him and check out what he’s doing. Being on the floor, she can’t see up over a lot of things, and the curiosity just kills her. Even in her crib, if she’s awake and aware that we’re in the room, she’ll stop playing with her toys and pull the bumper down so she can peer over and see us.

As sad as I am to see my baby girl leaving the tiny baby stage and becoming a crawler and a creeper, I also find it incredibly exciting to watch her learn and grow and explore the world around her. I hope she continues to reach higher and higher all her life. After all, in the words of Shakespeare, “A man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?”

Do You Know What I Know?

Like most toddlers, Ryan is always happy to show off his new tricks to anyone who’s willing to watch (or listen). Within the past few days, he’s had both a babysitter and his grandmother, Bammy, to show off to, and he took advantage of it both times. He ran around like a crazy boy, putting a box on his head and marching around, demonstrating his ability to put his potty seat on the potty without help, pointing out each and every wall in the room and proclaiming, “Wall!”, and breaking a few eardrums demonstrating his understanding of both the concept and the word “echo”. He’s very proud of what he’s learned.

But he doesn’t always need an audience. Sometimes he’s perfectly content to be his own audience. Yesterday morning, I woke up to a quiet recitation of his entire vocabulary coming from the other end of the hall. He had woken up and was entertaining himself (and unbeknownst to him, me) by going through his whole repertoire, just like a little parakeet. Uh-oh. Ball. Pooh. Potty. Wall. K (clock). Cuckoo. Pee! (“Pee” is always said with an exclamation point. He is a boy, after all.) Book. Mama. Poop! (Also always said with an exclamation point. Still a boy.) Vroom. Moo. Baaa. Neigh. Woo woo (that’s a train whistle). Woof woof. Up. Down. All done. Potty. (That one is apparently worth saying twice.) What. Why. Bye-bye. Bum. Eye. Bear. (All right, we’re from New England: he says bayah. Whattaya gonna do?) Rar. (That’s his lion/tiger/bear/dinosaur noise.) Ah-boom. Ah-ah-ah-choooo. Balloon. Echo! (Said in either an ear-splitting screech or a barely audible whisper, never anything in between.) Bee. Blue. At that point he had apparently exhausted himself and went back to sleep for 20 minutes or so, then woke up and did it all over again.

I love that’s he not only aware of all the new discoveries he’s making, but also that he’s just as delighted by them all as I am.

 

Wow!

For the past few weeks, Ryan’s vocabulary has been absolutely exploding. He picks up a new word or two almost every single day. Of course, a few of those words are merely mimicking something he hears someone say, but with no understanding of the meaning. For example, we tried to get him to say “thank you” the other day and got something that sounded vaguely like “takoooooo”, but he didn’t repeat it and he didn’t say it in the right context. But some words he grabs onto and relishes and uses every chance he gets. When I see him begin to play with his food instead of eating it, I often ask him, “Are you done?” and now he’s taken to announcing “Done!” whenever he’s finished with his dinner, or when his sippy cup is empty, or even when he’s ready to get out of his high chair. He obviously understands what “done” means. But my favorite new use-it-all-the-time word that he’s picked up is “wow!”.

I’m not always sure exactly what he’s referring to, but he seems to understand that “wow” means you’re looking at something new, or interesting, or different. And he often repeats it many times in succession, often with increasing (or at least varying) intensity or inflection. “Wow. Woooowwwww. Wow! WOOOWWWW!” In the morning, when he wakes up, we often hear a few quiet wows, apparently as he contemplates the excitement and adventures of the new day. Saturday night, we were visiting friends in New York and stayed in a hotel room with Ryan’s porta-crib beside our bed, and we woke at 3:45 am to the sound of a small voice excitedly (if somewhat drowsily) exclaiming, “Wow. Wow. WOW. Wow! Wooooooowwwwwww.” I’m not certain if he was even truly awake or not, but I can only assume he had just had an amazing dream.

The speed with which his vocabulary is growing is incredible to me, and the fact that the vast majority of his words are clearly understandable and used in the right context makes me shake my head in wonderment. That little brain is absorbing and learning at a rate that is just astonishing. His whole world is opening up as he learns to talk about it, to express his thoughts to the rest of the world, and to communicate with other people.

Wow.

Talk To Me

My son Ryan is reaching the age where he can both understand and speak quite a few words. It opens up a whole world of communication between the two of us. Often, this communication is very helpful. For example, when he’s starting to feel sleepy and he’s ready for a nap, either I’ll ask him if he’s “ready to go up?” and he’ll start up the stairs toward his room, or he’ll announce “up, up, up!” to let me know it’s naptime.

Sometimes it’s helpful but a bit embarrassing. When he has a dirty diaper, he’s taken to proclaiming, “Bum!” to let me know. Helpful, but embarrassing, at least in public. And, being a boy, of course another of his new favorite words is “pee”, which he uses to point out the toilet every time he walks past a bathroom, but which he also uses to announce to anyone in the house whenever Mommy goes to use the bathroom. It’s not so bad when Daddy is the only other one home, but when we have guests it becomes a bit of an overshare.

Sometimes his newfound conversational skills are just the tiniest bit too limited. Every afternoon as I bring him downstairs from his nap, as soon as he sees the front door he requests, “Ball! Ball! Ball?” and then gets frustrated because he doesn’t understand my explanation of “after lunch” or “first we have to put your socks and shoes on”. I’m hoping that he’ll begin to understand the words “wait” and “later” very soon, but for now the poor kid gets apoplectic trying to convince me to take him outside to play ball when all I want to do is put on his shoes before we go outside.

But even with his conversational limitations, the fact that we now have give-and-take conversations where we both obviously understand each other is amazing to me. He happily complies with requests for a kiss or a hug, or to bring me a toy, or to throw something in the trash, or to show something to Daddy. Instead of merely pointing and grunting when he wants something, he can now often specifically ask for something that’s out of reach, like a book or a ball or a teddy bear or a pillow. He’ll even pick out a video by the picture on the cover and bring it to one of us, telling us which one it is by announcing “Pooh!” or roaring like the Lion King or making a monkey noise like King Louie in the Jungle Book.

But I’d better cut this entry short – I hear a small voice from the other room announcing, “uh-oh”…

There's a Double Meaning in That

My son doesn’t have much of a vocabulary yet. In fact, his total vocabulary consists of the following: “up”, “ball”, “bye-bye”, and “k” (which means “clock”). But for having only four words, he gets an awful lot of mileage out of them.

For one thing, each word has multiple meanings to him. “Up” means not only “up” as in going up stairs, but it also refers to the stairs themselves. I discovered this a few days ago when we were driving on a road in a hilly area where all the houses had stairs leading to them, and he eagerly pointed at each one and announced, “Up!” Similarly, “bye-bye” means not only “goodbye”, but is also used to indicate a door of any kind, whether or not anyone is leaving through it at the time.

The multiple use of “ball” developed from his after-service playtime in the church gymnasium, which has several basketball hoops. Every time we pull into the church parking lot, he points and exclaims, “Ball!” which I assumed referred to the basketballs that he plays with there, but then I noticed that when we pulled into our own driveway, he pointed to the neighbors’ house across the road and announced, “Ball!” as well. I was confused, since I didn’t see any balls there – until I realized that they have a basketball hoop in their driveway. He confirmed this association when we were driving by a random house with a basketball hoop and he again announced, “Ball!”, and once again when the Sesame Street set featured a basketball hoop. So apparently “ball” now refers to “basketball hoop” as well as anything vaguely resembling an actual ball.

But the most flexible word in his vocabulary is most definitely “k”. “K” applies to any kind of clock or timepiece, from a grandfather clock to a wall clock to a clock on a church tower to a wristwatch. But it also applies to anything with any kind of a dial or face, and anything round with hashmarks on it. Hospitals and grocery stores are both rife with “k” things, by this definition. Hospitals have blood pressure monitors with round gauges and bright orange hands, oxygen tank pressure gauges, even stethoscopes with printing on the business end. Grocery stores have big round produce scales and small deli thermometers, all of which he helpfully calls my attention to with a proud “K!”.

I’m certain that he’ll be adding more words to his vocabulary very soon. Hopefully, “vroom!” will give way to “car”, “buh-dup-a-dup” will become the more recognizable “banana”, and the words we’ve been repeating over and over, like “Mama” and “Dadda” and “cup” and “help” will finally sink in. But until they do, at least he’s making good use of the words he has. And hopefully, his creative use of language will continue to expand even as his vocabulary does!

On and Off, or, the Joy of Prepositions

When I was in 7th grade, my English teacher made everyone in the class memorize a long list of prepositions and recite them aloud. We got bonus points if we could blurt them all out within 20 seconds. I still remember long stretches of that list: aboard, about, above, across, after, against, along, among, around, at, before, behind, below, beneath, beside, between, beyond, by, down, during, except, for, from…(big blank space here where apparently I’ve lost some brain cells in the intervening years)…of, off, on, over, past, since, through, throughout, under, underneath, until, up, upon, with, within, without. And much in the same way that l m n o p in the alphabet song merges into the single complex letter “elemenohpee”, a number of the prepositions merge together into words like “alongamongaroundat” and “untilupupon”.

Ryan has another decade or so to go before he gets to discover that preposition list, but he’s getting a head start these days, particularly with the prepositions “on” and “off”. As I’ve mentioned before, he developed a fascination for light switches some time ago and as a result I repeat the words “on” and “off” to him all the time. Our morning ritual still includes waiting at the door of his room so he can flip the light switch while I announce, “Off!” And waiting again at the top of the stairs so he can turn the hall light “On!” And again at the bottom of the stairs to turn it back “Off!” And on and on. And every time, I carefully announce “off” or “on”. So I’m sure that he’s beginning to associate those words with a light turning off or on.

Although I’m afraid he might be a bit confused, because he’s probably also associating the words “on” and “off” with whether he’s flipping the switches up or down. And the added complication for that is that several of our lights are controlled by multiple switches, which means that flipping a switch down doesn’t necessarily turn the light off, and flipping it up doesn’t necessarily turn it on. I find that a bit confusing myself, and I know how light switches work.

And there’s still another wrinkle adding to the confusion: Ryan has recently discovered the art of putting something on the table and then taking it off the table, and I announce “on” or “off” as appropriate there, too. So as he learns to associate with word “on” with putting something on the table, will he also start to look around to see if a light just went on? And when he moves it off the table and I announce, “Off!”, will he be expecting the room to get darker?

But wait, it gets still more complicated. Ryan has learned to pull his own socks off, so we sometimes play the “on and off” game with his socks. He takes his socks off, I put them back on – all the while announcing, “Sock off! Sock on!”

When you think about it, the words “on” and “off” have an awful lot of meanings that don’t really seem to be related. What does extinguishing a light have to do with removing an object from atop another object, or pulling an article of clothing away from your body? But we explain all of those ideas with the word “off”. It’s amazing that children ever learn this crazy English language at all.

But I can’t think about that right now. I have to take off – Sesame Street is on!

Up!

This morning, I woke up to the sound of a small voice down the hall announcing hopefully, “Up? Up?” A couple of times over the past few days I had thought that Ryan might have said, “up”, but I wasn’t completely convinced that he was really saying it or that it was in the correct context until this morning. But there is now no doubt in my mind that he not only said it, but that he knows what it means.

A baby learning to talk is pretty amazing, when you think about it. The fact that they can make a connection between the sounds they hear and their context is really impressive. I do sometimes say the word “up” by itself to Ryan, but most of the time he hears it in the context of a sentence: “Do you want to get up?”, “Ryan is going up the stairs,” “Are you ready to get up?”, “Come up on the couch with Mummy.” And I apply it to many different objects and situations: I lift him up, he hops up on the couch, we slide the beads up the string, Daddy throws him up in the air, he climbs up the stairs, I pick up the book. It’s a fairly complex directional concept. And yet, he obviously knows that in the morning, I pick him “up”. In the morning, or after his nap, I ask him, “Are you ready to get up?”, or “Who’s up?” or I say, “Come on up,” as I pick him up. So he’s learned to associate the word “up” with waking up and getting up and being picked up. That’s amazing!

And although he doesn’t say many words yet (“up” is the list in its entirety), he understands quite a few. He knows who “Daddy” and “Mummy” and “Grammy” and “Bammy” and “Pappy” are, and will look at the correct person if we say their name. He’ll look at the right object if you say “bottle” or “ball” or “book”. I suspect he knows a few others, like “kitty” and “snack” and “stairs” and “tubby” and “juice”. So know that he’s broken through the barrier and said a word in the right context and gotten the desired response, I wonder how long it will be before he learns to say new words to express himself.

What a sense of freedom and power that must be, to suddenly discover that you can communicate with others by using words! When he wants to get up, he can tell me so by saying, “up”. When he wants to look at his book, he’ll be able to say “book”. When he wants to play with his ball, he’ll be able to ask for it by name. Even if his sippy cup isn’t nearby for him to point at, he’ll be able to tell me what he wants by saying the magic word, “juice”.

A whole new world is opening up for both of us – the wonderful world of words!

Vox Humana

I wish I’d had the tape recorder or a video camera by my bed this morning when Ryan woke up, because his morning vocal pyrotechnics get funnier and more elaborate every day. He seems to use the morning as his time to experiment with his voice. The sounds often begin with a quiet humming, then move on to a succession of vowels, ending with a series of exclamations: Eee! Gug! Oof! HaaaAAAaaah! Generally followed by his staccato “Bert laugh”. Then some more humming which is often suddenly muffled when I imagine he sticks a rag (or a teddy bear, or the corner of his blanket, or whatever else might be handy) into his mouth.

My favorite part of listening to the whole process is picturing what he’s doing. The exclamations are often accompanied by the clunk of the side of the crib being jiggled, so I suspect he’s standing up and bouncing while he does those. The quieter humming at the beginning and end generally includes some soft squeaking so I think he’s probably lying down, rolling around on his back with his feet in the air. When I come in to wake him up, I sometimes catch him in the act – he’s usually concentrating on listening to himself so intently that I can watch him for several minutes before he notices me in the doorway.

I’m especially curious to hear how his morning “chatter” will evolve as he learns to talk. Will I hear him having conversations with himself? Will he repeat new words that he’s learned? Or will this continue to be a time to merely experiment with the different sounds that he can make, regardless of language or meaning? I suppose that at some point in time he’ll recognize that others are (or could be) listening in, and he’ll keep it to himself. But until he reaches that point, I’m going to thoroughly enjoy listening to him discover his own voice.