Language Acquisition

Lately, Valerie has been watching Sonic the Hedgehog on Netflix. (Yeah, yeah, I'm a terrible mom, I know.)

Which means we've been roleplaying a lot of Sonic the Hedgehog. The first few times she asked to play, she told me, "Mom, you be the blue head." Which was a logical way of referring to Sonic, since, well, he has a blue head. Sometimes, she would call him "the blue super bear," so I think she didn't know what a hedgehog was. She knows porcupines (and pygmy marmosets and naked mole rats - Thank you Philadelphia Zoo!) but I don't think she's ever seen a hedgehog before. And, to be fair, even if she had, Sonic doesn't look much like an actual hedgehog.

Then she started calling him "Yonic", which was amusing to me in a nerdy, "Ha ha, my daughter is using inappropriate words that are way beyond her realm of understanding" kind of way. Then she started calling him "Onyx", which is a simple shuffle of the "s" sound from the beginning of the word to the end of the word ("onics"). "Onyx" is also the name of a horse on another show that Valerie likes to watch. I have noticed that, when faced with a new word, Valerie will often replace it with the closest word she already knows. When I offered her a poncho the other day, for example, she called it her "pom pom".

Then, a few days later, Valerie asked me to be "the blue head jog". That's when I realized that Valerie may have known what a hedgehog was after all, but Sonic wasn't a "hedgehog" to her, he was a "jog" with a blue head. A "blue head jog". Say it out loud.

But these adorable Valerie-isms don't last long. Because after she hears it the "right" way a few more times, she usually stops doing it. Sometimes, it takes a lot of self-restraint on my part not to reinforce her adorable misconstructions, but I know it does her no good in the long run to sacrifice accuracy for adorableness. I don't correct her, but I do say it the right way myself, and eventually, she abandons the cute alternative. (Although sometimes she spends a lot of energy beforehand arguing that her way is right. She just finished watching a new show called 64 Zoo Lane, and as the credits ended, she said, "Mom, it's called Zixy Call!" I said, "Oh? Sixty Four?" and she said, "No, Zixy Call, listen to the song!" and then she started the show again so I could hear them singing the Zixy Call theme song.) Her pom pom became a poncho within a few days, and I know Onyx will suffer the same fate sooner or later. Yesterday, Valerie said to me, "Mom, you be the blue super bear... er... hedgehog."

Watching her learn is pretty adorable, too, though.

I think she's signing!

This morning, Dorothy was sitting on my lap, and I noticed her opening and closing her hand. This is the sign we use for nursing, so I asked her if she wanted nursies. She gave me a big smile, latched on, and had a good, long feeding. She only ever nurses when she is actually hungry, so I was a little less willing to write it off as a coincidence as I was the first time Valerie signed at me (since Valerie would nurse at any and all opportunities). Still, I wasn't completely convinced.

Then, at lunch, I put her in her high chair with some turkey, and she kept eating it, and looking at me for more. After her fourth helping, when she was finally full, she looked up at me, smiled, and stuck both hands straight up in the air - which is almost the sign for "all done". She kept smiling as I cleaned her up and got her out of her seat.

By George, I think she's getting it!

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An Open Letter to an Anonymous Commenter

Dear KE:

I don't know who you are, and you obviously don't know me. I'm pretty sure I've never written about abortion on this blog, and I don't plan on writing about it now. It's an extremely volatile topic, and I would much rather write about the lovely trip I just took to Florida.

However, abortion debate aside, I stand by my use of the word "fetus". Fetus is the scientifically accurate term for any mammal, human or otherwise, during its developmental stages before birth. Actually, I deliberated over the wording of that post for a while, and ultimately settled on the word fetus, even though at Christmas, Auggie was technically still in the embryonic stage. But, by the time of posting, he or she was already into the fetal stage, so I took the liberty of using that word rather than "embryo", simply because I thought it sounded better and made for a punchier punch line.

So, if you want to stop reading my blog because of ridiculous assumptions that you have made about my politics and morality based on my refusal to redefine the English language to suit political ends, so be it. That's one less judgmental and spiteful reader for me to worry about upsetting.

Sincerely,
Jule Ann.

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