And counting

Probably the biggest news over the last few days is that V is keen on counting everything from the steps to our apartment to the number of macaroni pieces on her plate. She now gets up to about four, then she might skip to six or seven, but some semblance of the numbers 1-10 are all in there. I can also hear her counting to herself (sheep, maybe?) when she falls asleep at night. What's encouraging about her counting objects is that this makes me think she might actually understand that numbers quantify things--in other words, she's not just reciting a list, she might actually understand what numbers signify. Clearly, this would be a milestone. I should note, however, that I am only aware of her doing this in English. I think she knows at least the first three numbers of both Finnish and Swedish, but I don't think she uses them productively.

There has been evidence of other kinds of abstract thinking. She has been making comparisons about what she wants today based on what she had yesterday, for example. I noted some weeks ago that she lacks most prepositions, and this is still the case, so she strings together whatever words she knows to get her point across. One day she didn't like the yogurt I tried to give her for her breakfast, so she advised me, "Same yogurt yesterday." OK, so the as was missing, but she got her point across.

Here's another milestone: she has figured out that our matrix language in this country is Finnish. It used to be that in a new situation she would follow my lead, speaking whatever language I spoke (often accompanied by weird looks at me -- "Mom, why are you butchering Finnish when you're supposed to be speaking English?" We follow the one parent/one language rule). The other day we were in a store where there were model airplanes hanging from the ceiling, and V found this very exciting. I asked the sales clerk a question in English, and V, still excited about the airplanes, said to him, "There's a ..." Then she thought for a moment and switched to Finnish: "lentokone" (that's airplane in Finnish). Ever since, she has spoken Finnish as default when we have been in public. I find this an amazing revelation.

Here's something else of interest. V has been home with us during the holidays, meaning that she has not been with her babysitter for two weeks. Apparently, during this brief time, V's English started to subsume her Finnish. Today the babysitter reported that V was very talkative in Finnish, asking the same questions over and over again, as if trying to reconnect to the language (and, no doubt, to the babysitter, as well. V really missed her!).

I haven't written about particulars here for a long while, so here is a brief list of language-related occurrences during the past few weeks.

October 27: The first time V constructed a question in English, using verb inversion: "Can you make (it)?"
October 28: first use of a possessive pronoun + noun: "This is my bottle." Since, she has pretty much nailed the use of possessive, including mine, yours, etc.
November 1: Baby's first curse words! "Damn it!" OK, not my proudest moment as a mother, but, in my defense, we had just moved to a new apartment, so there was plenty of stress in the air ... along with the cursing.
November 17: Another example of semantic extension: She referred to the skin of a kiwi as a "crust," asking me to "take the crust away."
November 30: She spontaneously counted three meatballs.
December 21: The first time I noticed her using a dependent clause: "I think it's a light." She now uses such constructions frequently.
December 27: OK, this is just an unabashedly cute story. She kept wanting to open her Christmas calendars even after December 24, although I tried to explain numerous times that Christmas was over. Finally, one morning, she pointed to her room, where the calendars and plenty of other Christmas detritus was still hanging out. She said, as if to correct me, "Christmas is over there."

One more point I have been meaning to mention is her developing system for negation. She understands that both not and no are related to negation in English, but she hasn't yet figured out the positioning. She'll accurately say, for example, "No, not this one," but she also sometimes says, "No this one." She has yet to acquire the use of negation with verbs. Usually, she says something like, "Mamma not do it." I suppose the use of the periphrastic do will come much, much later ("Mamma doesn't do it.")