Wednesday, January 26, 2011

the native tongue of a 2-year-old

Today Cami said batteries. Not "babbies", BATTERIES! I was quick to correct her.

"Um, honey... you mean 'babbies'?"

"No Mommy... ba-ter-eeees. BATTERIES."

"NOOOOO!! Not that one too! Can't we please just keep that one?! I'm not ready for it to go! Please can we keep babbies!?"

[staring at me]

"Hee hee... batteries Mommy."

It's a sad day.

One by one they're fading away and being replaced. Her words. Her sweet little words. She doesn't understand how we love them. She is such a little perfectionist (not sure where that trait came from...ahem) and every time she perfects yet another one of her cute little words it means she's getting older.

"Diddy" is now Kitty.

"Nonny" is banana.

"ahTAHoh" is avocado.

"appauce" has become applesauce (thanks to Cousin Felicity for correcting her)

and speaking of...

"Wissy" has been Felicity for a while now :(

We lost "lellow" around Thanksgiving.

And her "bobberm" is now her bottom.

As with "babbies", I have tried my best to save each of these words in hopes of preserving the original 2-year-old Cami verbiage. She is not much help since she finds a rare joy in correcting her mommy.

There do, in fact, remain a few words still in transition:

"thlank you" still includes the mystery "L" and gets sweeter every day.

"stoomie" has evolved into the more commonly used 'scuse me.

Though she does know how to say it right, she still prefers to wear "meanies" rather than panties.

And our old friend the "Snut" (Noah's skunk) has acquired the new and improved title of "Snuk." Getting closer but not there yet!

One word I'm pretty confident we'll be hanging on to for a while is "dere" (girl). Sometimes she attempts it but isn't completely satisfied with the outcome and honestly neither am I.

She's growing up and it's bittersweet but I'm dealing with it and it helps to be able to blog about it.

In the meantime we praise her for her improvements but still give her lellow nonnies for breakfast and tell her to kiss Diddy goodnight. She corrects us of course, but we just smile and playfully argue about it.

It's only a matter of time before she masters the English language and disappoints us all!

Today she was watching me from her Learning Tower as I prepared a chicken to bake in the oven.

"What's that Mommy? Can I touch it?"

"Yeah Sweetie. This is called aluminum foil. Can you say ah-lu-mi-num?"

"Ah...lumum-mim... hee hee."

That's right. I just bought us some more time.