Sunday, January 31, 2010

Toddler Talk

Before I was a mom, it always amazed/amused me at how parents seemed to understand their toddlers perfectly well, while I just looked at them in confusion trying to figure out what, "Myfdakl;afdkajfdkda;aaaad no!" meant. Now? I speak Toddler. Or, rather, the Carter dialect of said language. I can understand my kid perfectly fine, but other kids? Not so much. I still look at them with a big smile and said, "Really?" in a very excited voice, but have no clue what they just said to me.

And what's funny is that I don't even notice the words that Carter mispronounces until it's pointed out to me. To me, he's speaking perfect English. For instance, I never thought twice about the way he said, "What are you doing?" until my mom laughed about how he says, "dooning" instead of "doing." Sounded right in my head. It's like when people are immersed in new languages and they stop translating to their first language and start to dream in the second language. Carter is my second language.

So now I'm trying to keep an ear out for how he says things, just so I can remember these toddler days and how he sounded. For example:

girl = gwer-uhl
doing = doo-ning
ladies = wadies
Miss Dorothea (his teacher) = Miss Dor-fee-fah

There are many more, but as I'm paying closer attention, I'm actually finding that he really does have good pronunciation for the most part. If you talk to him on the phone, you can have an actual conversation and understand what he's talking about. In fact, he even speaks dog. He talked to Uncle Brian's dog Remi on the phone the other day. They had a whole conversation. For real.

4 comments:

Mom said...

Funny posting.

MB said...

Hilarious!

My favorite from Mari lately is Thank Yoooon! Or instead of "No, thanks" she'll just say "No thank."

NG said...

Before I was a mom, I thought every parent understood everything their toddlers said. So when we invited a couple over for dinner one night and their toddler had a conversation with me that consisted of "Myfdakl;afdkajfdkda;aaaad no!" I asked the parents what he said. They shrugged their shoulders and said, "We have no idea. Do you understand that?"

Fighting Mama said...

That's so cool! I look forward to hearing more Carter-speak in the future. :)

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