Something I didn’t quite understand about young children before I had them – it takes them a while to learn how to speak. And it’s not just vocabulary building, it’s pronunciation, but I’m not talking about the cute way they say spaghetti. There’s this whole period of time where they’re screaming the same word over and over at you while you play some desperate charades game of trying to figure out what they’re telling you.
G: “Eee-ahhhh!”
Me: “Pizza? You want to eat some pizza?”
G: “Eee-ahhh!”
Me: “Are you looking for someone? The cat? Your brother?”
G: “EEEE-AHHHHHH”
Me: “Pasta? Is it food? Animal? Llama? Zebra?“
*G holds fist out* “Eee-ahhh!”
Me: “Ohh.. booyah? You want a fist bump? Yes?” Right.. how come I didn’t guess that the first time…
And it’s not just the youngest toddler. The oldest one, while he can talk quite well, still has occasional trouble getting his point across. He messes up words, he forgets what things are called, and a lot of words sound similar.
We’ve been doing a lot of bird watching lately, because what else are you going to do in quarantine? That combined with he has a new pair of binoculars, he likes to fill the bird feeders, and we have a lot of birds to watch. He knows that Blue Jays are my favorite, and his are the “orange bird” aka Cardinals. (Don’t even try to tell him they’re red). And if you’re wondering about Robins, since they do have some orange on them, he HATES Robins. They make him cry.
Recently we taught him what a Dove was, since we have a lot of Mourning Doves around too. For the longest time he though we were saying “duck”, though, when we pointed them out. He’s stand at the window and say “Mama! A duck! Look at the duck!” and I’d come over to see a Dove at our bird feeder. So we’ve had to correct him a few times that no, they’re not ducks, they’re doves.
Further complicating this is the fact that we do have a duck. A few days in a row we were sitting outside on the lawn when a duck flew over our heads, low enough to be jarring and grab our attention. We’d laugh at the randomness of it all, and move on. Until one day we watched it fly into the woods near our house and disappear into a brush pile. So apparently we have a duck’s nest in our woods, which is pretty cool. We’d catch sight of her every few days, always flying in the front yard to her nest.
Then a few days ago I was cleaning up a snack that the kids had just finished, and E was standing at the back sliding glass door watching the birds. “Mama! Look at the ducks! There are ducks in the grass!!” I didn’t look up, but I told him “Oh remember, those are doves. Not ducks, those are doves.” Still he insisted. “No! Mama DUCKS! DUCKKKKKKK” he stretched out the K. It was enough to make me glace out the window, and holy cow, DUCKS!
Marching across our backyard was a mother duck and a whole fuzzy mound of baby ducks bouncing behind her. I started yelling loudly enough that Tom left a video call he was on to look out the window too. We watched her lead them across the yard and off into the woods behind the neighbor’s house. It was the best mood booster, and such a cool experience. And then I had to tell E, that yes, he was right… there were ducks outside!
“Mama, I told you!”
