(no subject)

[rivka]

On a parenting board I used to read, there was a woman who was so convinced that her children were gifted that she claimed her three-month-old daughter had made a verbal joke.

One of my goals is not to be that woman.

So I've felt a little funny about mentioning Alex's verbal development, which, while it's not in the "my child is the greatest genius the world has ever known" category, is not really what you'd expect of a twelve-month-old. Most kids say their first or second word about now. Alex has about a dozen: Mama, Daddy, hi, bye, no, dog, bird, cup, kitty, ball, balloon, pretty. They're not clearly articulated - "dog" is more like "gah" - but they're consistently applied. She says "gah" for dogs on the street, dogs on TV, pictures of dogs in books. A peacock at the zoo was met with "Bir'! Bir'! Pri'y!"

On Wednesday, we took the bus up to see our friends Emily and Zoe. We had never made the trip before, which involved a long winding walk across the Johns Hopkins campus. I was looking off into some trees when I heard Alex exclaim, "Ki'y! Ball!"

Kitty? Ball? Honestly, I'd been dubious about whether "kitty" was a word she said at all, given that we don't have a cat and she only encounters them in books. But she'd called a squirrel "ki'y" when we were out for a walk, and she said it about book pictures of cats, so it was tentatively on my word list. Still: a kitty and a ball on the JHU campus?

Then I looked up, and saw this:

Comments

Too cool.

[txanne.livejournal.com]

And just so you know, "all-Alex, all-the-time" is fine by me.

[therealjae.livejournal.com]

Colour me unsurprised that one of the areas in which your daughter would excel would be verbal development. :-)

-J

[janetmiles.livejournal.com]

Dang! That's moderately impressive, yep. Not at all surprising, though.

[geekymary.livejournal.com]

I don't think you're bragging at all. For a one year old girl with intelligent, verbal parents, speaking like that is perfectly normal and absolutely wonderful.

Plus, if I think you're bragging too much about Alex, I'll just start bragging about Eddie. :)

[rivka.livejournal.com]

I hope to see you bragging very soon about Eddie's superior ability to stay out of the hospital.

[huladavid.livejournal.com]

I thought it was pretty cool that the first thing my older nephew said to me was, "Unca Dabid, I gotta book!"

"Wow", I thought, "nouns, verbs, and two possible meanings!"

(Sorry, but I wasn't able to pull up the photo. What was it?"

[rivka.livejournal.com]

(Sorry, but I wasn't able to pull up the photo. What was it?"

A statue of a lion resting its paw on a ball.

[hobbitbabe.livejournal.com]

That's so cool! What fun it must be to watch! Did/do you guys do signing at all?

[rivka.livejournal.com]

We meant to, and I bought a book of baby signs. I even picked out a set of signs that would be good to begin with. But we didn't get around to actually doing it, and then it was clear that she was learning spoken English fairly quickly.

[minnaleigh.livejournal.com]

That woman sounds like my parents! My mother still insists that I was speaking at 6 months and that my first word was "Gokey." She admits that they never figured out what it meant but I said it a lot so she's convinced it was meaningful. And my dad says my niece said, "I love you Grumpy" to him when she was 3 weeks old. Um, yeah. My parents are crazy. They love us but they are insane. There's a big difference between that and you telling us about Alex's word use. I'm impressed with her word list! And her use of "kitty".

[castiron.livejournal.com]

Very cool!

It sounds eminently plausible to me that she'd call a squirrel "kitty", especially if most of the dogs she's met have floppy ears -- she could easily be generalizing from the ear shape, or just using "kitty" to mean "any four-legged critter that isn't a dog".

[rivka.livejournal.com]

I think "kitty" may be any non-dog, non-bird animal. Although you might be right about ear shape, because she called a lop-eared goat we saw at the zoo "gah" (dog).

[pariyal.livejournal.com]

When N was that age she had "poes" (kitty) for quadrupeds smaller than herself and "paa[r]d" (horse) for larger ones. Some dogs were cats, others were horses. When we saw a raccoon (in a cage) coiled up with its nose under its tail, she commented "Poes, mooie saat (staart)": "kitty, pretty tail". She may have been slightly older then, probably about 14 months.

Birds came in three sorts: in the air (voge[l] = bird), on the ground (atje, "eendje" = duck) and in the water (sraam "zwaan" = swan).

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

My cats have a squirrel noise and they use it at those little dogs with fluffy tails.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

It seems to me that a certain amount of bragging about how impressive your children are is not only acceptible, not only expected, but a biological imperative.

And, in your case, well-deserved.

[roozle.livejournal.com]

Ah. That "biological imperative" theory, I'll be relying on that.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Right. The fact that all three of your children are not only brilliant and talented, but, even more importantly, decent and good human beings with integrity and honor -- that has nothing to do with it. It's all about the biological imperatives.

[mactavish.livejournal.com]

Oh that's so precious!

[redbird23.livejournal.com]

As long as I'm allowed to claim that my future child is brilliant, when he/she gets to the point that he/she can be brilliant (because really, there can be more than one brilliant child), then I will point out that Alex definately shows signs of brilliance. :)

[geminigirl]

Color me impressed. Not just at the verbal development, but also the application of the word "kitty" to the lion, who I suspect, you call a lion when you encounter such things (yes, I know, the wilds of Baltimore and all) and not a kitty at all-it appears from this story that not only does she know "kitty" but that she knows that there are other things that are similar enough to call them "kitty." Meow!

[treadpath.livejournal.com]

That is so cool! Tamsin doesn't say anything consistently yet (she's 11 months). Sometimes I wish she would, since it would make communication so much easier. Though she does point at stuff a lot, and is pretty good at expressing what she wants through body language.

I think that's very cool you have such a smart, observant, and articulate daughter! :)

The kitty thing made me think of our neighbor's son who, whenever he saw us walking our dogs, would point and meow at us. It used to make his caregiver freak out a little ("No! Those are dogs! Dogs go woof!") but we thought it was great, and would always say hello and sometimes meow back at him. He seemed to like that.

[journeywoman.livejournal.com]

Too cool! Wow!

I am amazed by how observant toddlers are. Once E insisted there was a dog, but I had no idea what he was talking about. Then I followed his line of vision way across the playground, and behold--there was a small white terrier.

There are some really bizarre people on MDC. I stumbled across a thread the other day where the OP was wondering if the "early walker - late talker" relationship was accurate, and it turned into a major brag fest, much of which just didn't seem realistic to me. I mostly stick to working mamas, the TP, and a cloth diapering board, though. Too many fruit loops on the rest of the forums.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

Funny how you knew right away which board I meant. ;-) The turning point for me, with MDC, was the discussion on the gentle discipline board about how distracting your baby/toddler isn't really gentle discipline, because it's manipulative.

I did get some nice things from the Trading Post, though, so I'm grateful that you pointed me there.

I know what you mean about how observant toddlers can be. On our walks, lately, Alex points out every single bird in the city of Baltimore. Usually long before I see them.

[journeywoman.livejournal.com]

Oh my God, the gentle discipline board is the worst. I cannot believe the models that some people espouse there. Like how you're a terrible parent if you teach your kids to not hit people, because you're imposing artificial boundaries on them, and what if they're in a situation someday when they need to defend themselves but can't because OMG you taught them that hitting is wrong? I can't read that board, even though we're definitely in a stage where discipline is an issue and I need ideas.

The TP, though, is great, and there is lots of support in Working Mamas. I think the women who post there are more, hm, experienced in negotiating the collision between idealism and reality.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

I stumbled across a thread the other day where the OP was wondering if the "early walker - late talker" relationship was accurate, and it turned into a major brag fest, much of which just didn't seem realistic to me.

Okay, I may be a bad person, but I just had to go find that. I guess that Alex isn't verbally advanced, compared to all those kids who were saying their first words at two or three months!

My favorite is the false modesty variant: "I guess she was an early-ish talker. Her vocab at 14 months was over 200 words." The "gifted children" thread is rife with stuff like that: "She's reading Shakespeare at age 5, with full comprehension, but I don't know if she's gifted - she might just be bright."

[ailbhe]

*laugh* My mother has no doubt that I was an early talker, with 200 words at 15 months - but she wasn't *proud*, she was *exhausted*.

(My cousin Johnny said his first word in imitation of someone else at three months, perfectly clearly, with total lack of comprehension, and didn't do it again until he was actually learning to talk. It's apparently not uncommon).

[saoba.livejournal.com]

Dear Alex,

You are even smarter than your Mama and Papa think you are. Please, be gentle with them. (This won't make much sense right now, but it will in a couple of years and it's best to begin in the way you mean to go on.)

Love,

Barbara

[selki.livejournal.com]

*icon love*

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

The first person I heard say that was Mary Kay, but she says she got it from someone else and can't remember who.

[selki.livejournal.com]

I've seen "icon love" several places, don't know the origin.

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

I should have been more specific, I meant what the icon says -- Fandom means never having to ask "where on Earth would you wear something like that?"

[wiredferret.livejournal.com]

I believe it. Baz was definitely talking that early.

And Kay, at 18 months, is only now amassing a 20-word vocabulary.

And they're both perfectly normal, if you overlook their hill-giant tendencies.

(I am honestly anxious about taking Kay in for her 18-month checkup. It's going to be constant defense about how it's okay that she is a big, strong, big, sturdy child.)

[boxofdelights]

Wow!

[pameladean]

That seems genuinely exciting to me, and I'm not even a parent. I think you get to brag a bit.

P.

[toadnae.livejournal.com]

Bragging is a wonderful and splendid thing to about any small child one loves. I love bragging about my nieces and nephew.

In terms of the talking, it sounds to me like Alex is definitely ahead of the curve. I'm noticing that first kids with highly verbal parents tend to do that. My oldest niece had reliable words before her first birthday, and was doing multi-word phrases and sometimes sentences before she was two. However, she lives in a house with five adults who have very little better to do than talk to her and read to her.

[ailbhe]

ALWAYS trust the toddler. The toddler knows what she's seeing and can see more than most adults anyway :)

And otherwise, you could end up like the parents who say "No, darling, don't be silly, the moon only comes out at night, that's the sun" as they stand under a midday moon.

[mactavish.livejournal.com]

Not much different from the woman I heard yelling at the man in Sacramento, California, on a shipping lane from the Pacific, "Those are NOT sea gulls! We aren't at the sea!" (Never mind that a gull is Utah's state bird. Of course gulls can be inland. There's trash inland. Oh, and fish.)

[ailbhe]

She was't responsible for his education, though. At least, not if he was an adult. Somehow I find adults misinforming each other a lot less scary.

[janetmiles.livejournal.com]

(I was browsing back through Rivka's journal and ran across this; I know it's way old.)

Many years ago, Dale and I were walking through a shopping center parking lot in Knoxville, Tennessee, when a couple of birds swooped by.

"What the heck," I said, "those looked like seagulls, but surely not! We're nowhere near the ocean!"

"You're right," Dale said, "they do look like seagulls. I wonder if they got blown off-course by the storm? Maybe they're confused by the wet asphalt and think it looks like water?"

Several hours later, Dale turned to me with that "Duh, I coulda had a V8!" look on his face and said, "Of *course* they're gulls! They follow the trash barges up the river."

Yep. Gulls. Trash barges. Rivers. Boy howdy, did I feel like an idiot. (But at least I wasn't screaming at him.)

[ailbhe]

Always trust the toddler!

Much worse are parents who tell their children to stop talking nonsense, the moon only comes out in the daytime. Ugh.

[mactavish.livejournal.com]

And the kitty wants to roll the ball to Alex!

[selki.livejournal.com]

*happy squeal*

I love that she said that, in response to seeing that statue!

Percentiles?

[dragon3.livejournal.com]

Wouldn't it be a little surprising if Alex failed to exceed some norms? Bright parents, bright environment, bright kid. I rolled for it and failed to be surprised. Just enjoy it and prepare for her turning two much earlier than you may have expected.

That, and don't be too surprised if it's a good long time before random adults have a clue what she's saying.