"Are you crying?"

Last night when I was putting V to bed, she gave me an extra, extra, extra hard time. It appears she is at the age when they start testing boundaries ... and they don't stop for a long, long time, from what I understand -- if ever.

For about an hour, she was calling out, "Mamma! Mamma!" over every little thing she could come up with. She wanted to read a book. She was thirsty. She wanted her blanket. She wanted her nightlight turned off. All of these pleas I could ignore, but what finally got me was when she called out, "Mamma, put on a clean diaper!" I had put a clean one on her just as I put her down for the night, so I couldn't figure out this request. When I went to check what was happening, she was stripped naked to the waist, and was holding her supposedly soiled diaper up for me to inspect. However, it wasn't wet at all, and she officially had found a foolproof way to get me to come in her room: no way am I going to let her sleep without a diaper on at this stage in her life. I put on a fresh diaper and admonished her, saying that I wouldn't come into her room anymore, no matter what, and that it was time to sleep.

Then she started in on the fake crying. As she cried, she said to herself over and over in a loud, soothing voice, "What's the matter, sweetheart? Why are you crying, baby?"

So here I get the language-related point of this post. V continues to refer to herself in the second person, although once in a while she slips in an "I" ("I want milk," etc.). She also mimics what I say to her, which is what she was doing when she was consoling herself during her crying fit (she was imagining what a nice mommy would have said ...!). She frequently asks me a question that seems to be directed at herself, perhaps anticipating what I myself would say to her: "Did Nik give you a shovel?" (when she herself has a shovel in her hand). "Did you eat all your macaroni?" "Are you sad, sweetheart?" Etc.

Since I only speak English to her, it continues to surprise me when she comes out with conversations and words in her other languages. Tonight with her daddy she was naming letters of the alphabet in Swedish. It was kind of hit and miss, but still, she knows the right terms, even if she doesn't usually match them to the right letter. She also knows the names of all her fingers (the equivalent of middle finger, ring finger, etc.) in Swedish. She doesn't know those terms in English, so it's interesting to get clear evidence of how her language skills are related to the relationships she has and what she tends to do/talk about with different people.