Word Spurt

« Young lovers. :) »

I gave the teachers at Kaisla's daycare one of the Lomo actionsamplers for a few days for fun just to see what they might come up with. The film was a bit too slow as it needs 800ASA and I think I only had a roll of 400ASA in the fridge, but the pictures were fun and goofy, just like this one where Kaisla and another boy are leaning in for a kiss. Soon, she'll be dating.

Now that Kaisla has started talking, it has been a lot of fun figuring out what she is saying as it is a tiny glimpse into what she's thinking. I also get an opportunity to amuse myself as I did last night where she pointed at a tabloid in the grocery check-out line and exclaimed, "Daddy!" I giggled and told her that while Gil Grissom or Colin Firth would be far more my type than Brad Pitt, I think I would have remembered having spent enough time with Brad to have given her cause to call him Daddy. She then started doing the same routine to the young and reasonably attractive guy behind us in the line which made him shift his weight and look at his shoes. I smiled at her and said that it wasn't nice to accuse random men of being her father as it makes them uncomfortable while trying to quickly remember if they were too drunk at some point to have actually fathered a child. The guy looked up and smiled and Kaisla offered him some of her snack. I was entertained.

She has also become rather enamoured of the word "pizza" as they serve cheese pizza one day per week for lunch at her daycare. I need to dress her in a toga and offer her services to the ad agency that does the "pizza! pizza!" commercials. Of course, when she says it really loudly in the grocery, I start feeling sheepish like I'm an unfit mother who hasn't cooked a proper meal for her child and feed her only pizza. Then I stop in the middle of the aisle and wonder what in the fuck am I thinking, her next word will be "take-away" and I'll paste a few monkey stickers on the delivery menus, make them into a little book and start teaching her how to order Thai and Pho for dinner! LARB GAI! PAD THAI! A brilliant solution to the time and expense of grocery shopping, not to mention all the wasted food that gets lost between the need for variety and our limited capacity to consume it all in a short amount of time. No cooking. No dishes. No mess. Child fed. Problem solved.

One fascination I have about her furious pace of language acquisition is in wondering what algorithm she uses to select which words are preferred in English and which are preferred in Finnish. She still says "kiitos" instead of "thank you" and cookie is a funny mashup of "kakku (cake)" and "cookie". She knows her alphabet, but some letters she prefers to pronounce in the Finnish style which, when it comes to the vowels, can be very confusing since I never did get them straight because, for example, I sounds like E. She has special affection for the letter Y, the letter M and the number 9.

Is is unsurprising that many of the words relate directly to people and food because these are basic needs in every life, young or old. Language is so important to learn and to learn to use effectively as so many things depend on it. Having spent time in an environment where the language was completely unfamiliar I have, perhaps, an appreciation for what it feels like to be trying to acquire a language and the frustration and isolation that comes with failed attempts to communicate. She has the advantage of having a brain optimised for acquiring language. I don't speak down to her at all by altering my vocabulary and she appears to understand quite a lot even though she can only speak a small fraction of the language she already knows.

The more I observe her, the more I am convinced that we adults are merely toddlers with baggage in aging bodies. :)