Lorelei, like many kids her age, is getting chattier every day. She’s also getting alarmingly “big kid like” in some ways.
Last night at dinner, halfway through a large serving of yogurt, Lorelei casually turned to me and said, “Hi, Mom.” She then looked over at Eric. “Hi, Dad.” I’m not quite sure where she picked this up, but we were glad when she reverted back to “Mommy” and “Daddy” a few minutes later.
Her newest word is “awful,” most commonly – and accurately – used to describe some of the homespun YouTube videos we stumble across on a regular basis in our continuing efforts to find new Elmo segments and fresh covers of Mahnah-Mahnah.
“E awful” [It awful], she’ll declare. Fortunately, whenever we ask her if a given person in her life is awful, her answer is always (at least for now) a giggly “No!”, as if it’s utter lunacy that we’re even suggesting such a thing.
Yesterday, she came home from daycare with a brand-new word that one of the teachers had been working on with them: onomatopoeia. I was tremendously impressed, especially since a) I don’t remember learning that word until late high school, b) I still have trouble remembering what it means (hint: think “Boing!” “Thwack!” “Thump!”), and c) that’s just a whole lotta syllables for those little mouths to wrap around.
“We learned another new word today, too,” the teacher told Eric at pickup time. “What word did we learn, sweetie?” she asked one of Lorelei’s classmates.
“Booger!” she announced. Now there’s a word the under-2 set can really get behind.
Onomatopoeia seems a little, uh, ambitious for that age. It is amazing the words they are able to grasp at such a young age. This weekend I have been trying to teach Belén what “future” is. It turns out it is kind of a hard concept to teach.
I’ve heard that some people have luck with the concept of “it will happen after so many sleeps,” but that doesn’t really help with the more vague, distant-future-type stuff. “Many, many, many sleeps from now..”