rivka | (no subject)

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:

stone lion with ball

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

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.

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.)

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.

(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.)