Sentences

  So, true confessions: when we went to Little Bug's pediatrician appointment for his 18-month old well-baby checkup, we asked her if she thought his language was ok. We talked about how he only had 19 words (he added "ta-da" in the last couple of weeks--as in, yay, I did that, look at me!), and she said she thought he was fine. We talked about whether we wanted him evaluated anyway, because given his rough start in life, we feel we're entitled to be neurotic; we weren't sure. She pointed to 50 (!) discrete signs as good evidence that there was nothing wrong with his language, and was interested in his innovation with them, like how after we showed him how to make his hands move around each other for the "Wheels on the Bus" song, he used the same motion as a sign for "roll."
  The visit went on for a while after that, discussing all the usual toddler things--a rash, vaccines, throwing toys, considering daycare, brushing teeth, whether he gets enough Vitamin D. Jackson enduring this--standing around in his diaper while we talked--bravely, looking at books and throwing a ball around, but then he got bored. He took his straw cup and rolled it at me, and said "Mama! Wawa!" and signed "roll."
  Our pediatrician laughed at us. There's nothing wrong with Bug's language, she said. He's acquiring language like a baby in a bilingual household. He just put together a three word sentence, which is advanced language development for his age.
  He's got sentences. I totally somehow didn't hear them. Now I hear them all the time. Leaving for work? I get a whole family geography:  Mama. Raura. bye-bye vroom-vroom. Mumma nana. (Mama Laura goes bye-bye in the car; Mama Jennifer [stays home and] nurses me.) Packing bags to go to grandparents? Raura Mumma [sign for baby] bye-bye (Mama Laura, Mama Jennifer, and Little Bug are going away). Hands by his side with palms up, Mumma? Where is Mama Jennifer?
  I used to feel totally superior to the parents who said that their little ones had words that they didn't identify as words until later (not only am I paying close attention to words, I can even work out his signs.)
  I just missed his sentences.

Talking

Little Bug is coming up on his 18 month birthday, and his Mama Laura has been driving him crazy about whether he shouldn't be saying more words. This weekend, when I started my "What's your word for...?" game, he put a block in his mouth and looked at me, somewhere between cross and amused. He may not be able to say, "Can you please chill out about that," in words, but he can sure convey it clearly.

And I know better. One of my favorite things that I've read about toddler's language acquisition is Kenn Apel and Julie Masterson's Beyond Baby Talk, where Apel confesses to having the following conversation with his son Nick when Nick was about Bug's age.

Nick, like Little Bug, was what language specialists call a "noun-leaver," a baby who emphasizes actions over things. So when Bug, for example, sees my coat--even when it's hanging up--he says "bye bye," because when you put on your coat, you leave. Similarly, in the following passage, Nick is using dada to mean juice, to refer to the action of carrying the juice over to him.

"Nick used the word dada to say juice, regardless of who happened to have juice or where the juice was. In other words, it was true word, even though it did not seem to be close at all to the actual adult pronunciation.
Nick (pointing at juice): "Dada."
Dad: "Juice? Say Juice."
Nick: "Dada."
Dad: (emphasizing the pronunciation more): Juuuuice."
Nick: "Dada."
Dad: (becoming a little impatient and forceful): Juuuuiiccee!"
Nick: "Daaaa daaaa!"

When I read it, this story left me howling with laughter. It is perfect. It reminds me of two things. First, toddlers are not imitating. Babies imitate; toddlers are learning language. And they are putting it together with their own incredible intelligence and logic. Nick is not interested in his Dad's word for juice; he has his own. The second is that what the development people mean when they say that a little one should have 20 words by 18 months is loose; bye-bye can count for coat, da-da for juice. Those outside your immediate circle might understand about 25% of what you say.

So being the slightly insane parent that I am, I set out to count Bug's words (and signs, just for fun: 37 reliable signs with clear meanings. But this is a post about words; signs don't count for the 18 month race for 20 words). So listening carefully to Apel, I am letting him have his own words for things.

Me: Do you have a word for sheep?
Bug: Baa.
Me: Do you have a word for go?
Bug: Gogogo!
Me: Do you have a word for something fell on the floor?
Bug: Uh-oh.

and so on. Through 10 or 15 words. So I'm relating all this to Jennifer, with my pen and list in hand, and Bug is standing beside me.  Zoe the cat jumps up on the radiator. "Oh!" I say. "I forgot cat! He says meow for cat," and I go to write it on my intense-mama list.

A little hand pats my thigh. I look down. 'Mona, he says, 'Mona.

I've forgotten that he switched from saying meow to (Ra)mona for the kitties, and he reminds me.

Did I mention that my sweet little guy doesn't miss anything? And that whether my list gets from 18 to 20 words in the next two weeks, when he turns 18 months, he is doing just fine.

It's his mama we need to worry about.

Boys and girls

While the eloquent 19-year old who assures Iowans that he hasn't been harmed by his lesbian parents has gone viral on Facebook, we have more prosaic concerns: Little Bug is currently denying the actual existence of girls.

We noticed that he was signing "baby" for every kid under 12, and we thought he needed more signs. So we tried to teach him signs for "boy" and "girl." He learned to do them on the plane back from Tucson, as I pointed out a girl and a boy and he repeated my signs back to me. They seem dated an ancient: "boy" involves drawing an imaginary cap above your forehead, and "girl" is signed by drawing a bonnet string along your chin.

Tonight we were at a tree-lighting in Amherst, complete with the UMass marching band playing religious Christmas carols--a tad strange--and he was "signing" away and otherwise communicating nonverbally in a carrier on my back. Clapping for the band, signing "more" every time they stopped, making "woof" noises for the dogs. And signing "boy" every time he saw a kid older than two. Some of them were clearly girls, and Jennifer would laugh and sign "girl" and say "no, that's a girl." Gendered sign language was not working well for him. He'd make his mock-frowning face and grunt in disagreement (for a kid with few words, he gets his important thoughts across with surprising clarity). Then he would sign "boy" again. "Girl" Jennifer would say and sign. "Boy" he would sign in reply. Then he'd point to himself and sign "boy."

And the anti-gay parenting folks were afraid he'd grow up confused about his gender. Nope. Just other people's.

Moo, Baa

Little Bug is a la-la-la kind of guy.

There's a book by Sandra Boynton, Moo, Baa, La La La, that is hugely popular with the toddler set. I've read it to lots of little kids, and it has something for everyone--animal sounds, silly drawings, and opportunities for personal creativity. By far the most popular line in my experience--which was extensive when I was a daycare teacher--is "No, no, you say, that isn't right!" This generally makes toddlers shriek with joy. "No" is pretty much the most fun word you can think of.

But not Bug. In the picture above, he is responding to his second favorite line: "Rhinoceroses snort and snuff." He pouts his lips out and snuffles, which generally makes his mamas laugh out loud. He sort of stares into the middle distance when you get to the "no no" part. He likes to make the cow sound, and the sheep sound, but then when you say, "Three singing pigs say la la la!" that's when he shrieks. "La la la la la la!" he says, "la la la!" until he falls over giggling.

That seems to be how he makes his way through life.

Earlier this week, when the power was out and and the house got to be down to 55 degrees, Mama Jennifer and I were starting to get kind of stressed. Little Bug thought the whole thing was a riot. Snow falling on his face made him tilt his head back, stretch out both his arms, open his mouth, and laugh and laugh. Lights out...well, that seemed kind of weird--he kept pointing to the light switches and reaching up, like, if were just taller I could help you out with this. You really should think about putting the lights on. Flashlights got a big grin, especially when he could hold it, and everyone curled up under lots of covers in the bed was just about as good as it could get. The only thing he really minded were diaper changes, never his favorite, and having his butt naked in the cold didn't improve his feelings about them. But all and all the whole thing didn't trouble him much, despite the fact that he didn't even own a warm coat. Friends had their baby tucked up in a sort of tailored blanket thing, like Bug is wearing above. We badly wanted one. Now that the heat's been on at our house for days (although we still have relatives and friends without heat, now 5 days after the storm), the snow is melting, and the roads are becoming passable again, we have a winter coat, a snow suit, and two warm blanket things. Now we are prepared for the last disaster, and almost certainly not the next one.

But Bug isn't trying to protect himself from an unpredictable future. We went to the mall and looked high and low for boots that were warm and fit. Finally, just as we were getting ready to give up, we found a guy in a scary Halloween costume--looking all hangman-ish, in black with a long lanky haired wig--to fit him for boots. They looked warm, they fit, they weren't funny looking...so we put them on him while he sat in my lap. When I set him down and asked him to walk, he didn't. He answered his own question instead: he started to dance. Funny boy just wanted to know if he could dance in those big boots.

That's my la la la guy.

Communicating

Learning to communicate with Little Bug as a toddler has its ups and downs.

A few nights ago, I was trying to get him to clean up his room. We put on the clean up songs, and I went to work, but everything I put on top of his toy bin he knocked off as soon as it got there. I picked up 26 alphabet blocks and put them in their tray, and down they came. I organized stacking rings on their posts, and off they went. The more I cleaned, the more mess we had.

I stopped and tried to figure out what was going on. I did consider the entirely reasonable question of whether he wanted his room clean--but I think he did, since that always comes before the bath, which is the high point of his day. I turned to him, and asked with some exasperation what was wrong, looking across the disturbing clear top of the toy bin, and the wreckage all around us--beads on wire toy, stacking cups, great piles of overturned blocks. What do you want? I asked. By now we had gotten to the up-tempo salsa "Hora de limpiar" song, and my son was vibrating with the beat. He picked his way to the bin and launched in an amazing drum riff, head down, hands dancing.

Ah, I thought. I see toy storage, he sees a really big, beautiful drum. Of course cleaning up means clearing it off.

It's hard to get on the same page when you are reading from different books.


I saw the 5-year old version of this in a conversation on a crowded path near the beach in Maine.

"Look, mama, dog poop," said a little girl.


"We need to walk quickly," said her mom, unwilling to acknowledge the dog poop but noticing the people piling up behind them.


"Poop, mama!" said her immoble daughter.

"Come on now, we need to keep going."


"POOOP!" she shrieked.


By this time, only the knowledge that I never want my parenting critiqued in public kept me from telling the mom that she was going to have to talk about poop if she wanted her daughter to move from the spot where she was fixed.


This tells me that impossible communication with a youngster with a different, essentially unrelated agenda should not be considered an isolated event. This is going to go on for years.

Sometimes, though, the toddler brain is not just on a different wavelength. It is completely incomprehensible.

For example, Bug hates getting pants on. There is no reason for this that I can discern; he's happier once they are on, warmer and better protected from scrapes. But getting them on is a major wrestling match. Once we were in a parking lot with a messy diaper, and it took two of us to get new pants on him--one to hold his flailing, hollering body up in the air, the other to position the pants so he could be dropped into them. The Neilds have a song about this--one that only the parent of a toddler could understand. The enemy called pants, pants, pants, the lyrics go. If you put those pants on me, I will cease to be so sweet...if you pull those to my waist, I will make a nasty face. The enemy called pants, pants, pants.

This tells me that the problem is not limited to our toddler. It's from someplace we could call planet toddler.


Another planet toddler moment: he has started to whine. He points to something, then engages in a high-pitched, super-annoying whine to tell me that this is what he wants. I was trying to talk him out of it.

"Little Bug," I said brightly, "what could you say instead?" I understand this is not totally fair. The kid has I think 5 words and about a dozen signs. If he could say, "I want to flip on the light switch," he probably would have. But the whine is going to make me start banging my head against a wall.



He considered my question gravely for a couple of seconds. He pointed at the light switch, and then blew in my face twice. I almost fell over laughing. I carried him to the light switch.



But then there are these moments of communication so perfect it breaks your heart.


Yesterday, his Mama Jennifer called to him that it was time for his nap. He got up from a book on making paella that he had been sitting and contemplating, and ran over to the stairs. Then he saw me and ran back to give me a hug good-bye. Then he very seriously and carefully crawled up the stairs, and got back on his feet at the top. Then he ran down the hall, waving his arms in the air and shouting "Na-na, na-na, na-na" (nurse) and got into the bed.

It turns out, though, that the maternal brain has moments as incomprehensible as the toddler brain. I missed my recalcitrant Bug.



As I watched him organize and plan all these different steps to get to his nap, all I could think was, who is this big guy, and where did my baby go?

Toddler

Little Bug said, or signed, his first sentence today. Jennifer and I were planning to take a long walk with the dog, and debating stroller vs. baby carrier. Bug piped up and said, "Na na" (nurse) and then signed "eat" (and then go to) "sleep."

It's bad when your toddler is nagging you for more naps.

He also has instituted nightly baths, which I felt he could go one or two nights without. But how do you answer someone who is 13 months old and signing "bath" and “more”?

It is of course possible that this baby signing thing is over-rated, that it just makes them bossier sooner. For instance, the baby books all say that sometime between 12 and 18 months they can start to follow two step commands (pick up that block and put it in the bin), which he can. But nobody says--because most folks sensibly don't give their toddlers strategies to talk at that age, when their mouths still can't do it--that they can begin to GIVE two-step commands at this age. But I got up today into the greyness of a rainy morning, and Little Bug paddled over to his room in his feet-y pajamas (because he was sleeping in our bed, natch), looked at me and signed (turn on the) "light" (then the) "music."

Ridiculous. (Dancing boy made up his own sign for put on the music: pumping his little hands back and forth by his ears. Gotta dance, mama, gotta dance.)

He has the most astonishing desires for the very things toddlers are supposed to hate. This morning he rejected pancakes for breakfast in favor of black beans, soy milk, and gorgonzola cheese.

It's now becoming clear what direction his terrible twos will take. He will be throwing temper tantrums at the co-op for more vegetables. Stomping angrily down the hall demanding to go to bed earlier.

All of this is not to say he is incapable of real mischief. He is ever ready to throw a shelf full of books on the floor, and he approaches getting into the car seat with a great grin, prepared to drive mamas to distraction with his ability to resist every effort to strap him in. He has faked me out in a store, engaging in misdirection and then darting through strangers’ legs to take off running, shrieking with laughter.

He also seems to have suddenly noticed the existence of other, mostly younger babies. He is riveted by them, staring and signing “baby” so enthusiastically that the swinging of his arms threatens to knock him down. He carries dolls around, handing them to me for a cuddle and signing “baby” at me. Did you know, he seems to be saying, that there are other babies in the world—little babies—and it’s not actually all about me? And I’m not really all that little any more?

But he is still pure sunshine, that boy, even as he is making astonishing leaps into toddlerhood. He certainly is more often a pain than he was when he was still at the potted plant stage. But he is also ever more himself, achingly wholesome and square one minute, so charmingly trouble the next that it’s almost impossible to keep from laughing. But above it all, able to concentrate more joy in every minute than I would’ve thought humanly possible.

If I can't dance....

If we leave Little Bug alone with the music playing, he dances.

He’s always liked to listen to music, and recently he’s started lifting up his arms and moving his whole body in response to us. But this dancing alone thing, not so much social as personal, is new and fascinating.

We discovered it when we left him in his room and put up the gate, and Jennifer was checking on him every couple of minutes. She was peeking in, and then waved me over silently but urgently, smiling broadly. She pointed, and there he was, lifting his feet and pumping his arms. We stayed and spied, trying not to laugh out loud and disrupt him. His face was full of joy.

We took him to a concert the other night, local bands in a park doing covers. He kept us laughing from Bohemian Rhapsody to Purple Rain to Heartbreak Hotel, throwing himself into a whirlwind of turning and shaking his head back and forth and shifting really fast from one foot to another. Always his hands were high in the air. Sometimes he sang when they were finished, la la la la, just so the music wouldn’t stop. He’s still so little he would lose his footing in the sharp slope of the amphitheater, but he never stopped smiling.

He’s as sensuous as a cat, and will arch his neck if you stroke it. Rhythms and music seem to be the same sort of thing, something he feels in his body that make him move.

It’s tempting to think of his enjoyment of music as something about the species, since he’s so young and seems to have always had it. But I think that’s wrong; he’s steeped in an environment full of us and others. “Isn’t it amazing,” said Jennifer tongue-in-cheek, “he has the exact same interests we do!” He listens to the same music we and the people we know do; he has dance moves he’s seen. But certainly there is something about music and dancing that is close to the bone of how humans build a world; having such a rich and very long tradition of loving it as we do.

But it’s rewarding to watch him interact with texts and music, especially because I teach college students to do something like that, at least the texts part. When something bad happens to Little Bug—he tumbles and does a face-plant—he acts it out again and again, telling us the story over and over until he feels better, making it narrative, assimilating what happened and moving on. He uses bedtime stories to build ways to use words and thoughts. In What’s Wrong Little Pookie?, Mommy asks Pookie if he needs a drink. Pookie didn’t, but Little Bug did the other night; he picked his head up when he heard it and started urgently signing “more.”

We make meaning in our world through stories and music. I knew that about adults, and how critical that is. Someone in my new office has posted the words women sang in the Lawrence “bread and roses” strike in 1912: “hearts starve as well as bodies, give us bread but give us roses.” At almost-13 months, Little Bug has found already that music fills his heart. Maybe it’s nurturing that contagious joy that is so much a part of him.