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Apr. 28th, 2006 07:36 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rivkaOn 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:
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:
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Date: 2006-07-08 01:25 am (UTC)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.)