Ribbit

Yesterday morning, like most mornings, I woke up early with V and set out to complete our ritual. The first thing she always wants to do after she gets out of bed is to turn on the star-shaped lamps in our windows. This is what we were doing when I looked outside and noticed a heavy fog obscuring everything.

Never one to miss offering an educational experience, I pointed outside and told V, "Fog, look at the fog."

She obliged and peered out, and of course in my mind's eye we were like some Mary Cassatt-style depiction of mother and daughter, both in our pajamas, V in my arms, looking out the window at the sea and fog.

Then V, her eyes transfixed outside the window, began to quietly repeat, "Ribbit. Ribbit. Fog," she pointed. "Ribbit. Ribbit."

So this is what I have succeeded in teaching my child, apparently: that there is an abundance of frogs lurking outside our windows. Foiled again!

All day yesterday, she repeated her observation, pointing out the window and saying, "Fog, fog. Ribbit. Ribbit."

This beckons a few words about both perception and production. It would seem that V's ears are tuned into English phonology, but not quite. Fog and frog are pretty close, after all. I have noted several times that her pronunciation is not perfect all the time, either. Some words, like her sister's name, she says perfectly some of the time, but other words, like bunny, socks, and lampa ('lamp' in Swedish) are, for the time being, consistently a bit off. She says bunny like "buddy," socks like "hocks," and lampa like "almpa." I can't quite find rhyme or reason as to why she says what she does the way she does; however, it seems that the sounds that seem to give her the most trouble in English are /r/ and /s/.

V is starting to put together larger chunks of language. Because she speaks English with me, I can only really comment on her English, of course. It seems to be the case that she is trying to formulate the right way of expressing more complex thoughts. For example, she says "Pepper back," when she has finished playing with the pepper shaker (like a lot of kids, she needs some sort of distraction so she can eat, right?) and wants me to put it back into its proper position. Her favorite new word is "help," and she gets a lot of use out of it. "Mamma, baby, help." "Put the baby's leg back on, Mamma." (I realize this might seem like a weird request. In explanation, the legs of one her baby dolls falls off all the time). Or "Spoon, help." "Help me eat my yogurt with this spoon, Mamma."Or today a new one was, "Daddy, Cava, bye-bye." "Daddy and Cava went outside."