Mini Alex update.

[rivka]

Alex is doing so many new things every day! I want to note some of them down so I don't forget them.

New words: baby, clothes, outside, nose, eye, toes, knee (only applied when viewed through ripped jeans, for some reason), light, kids, read, rocket, Pa (replaces "Daddy" to refer to her Papa), stars, blocks, bread, cake (mostly applied to rice cakes, also appears when playing pat-a-cake), clues (refers to the TV show "Blue's Clues," which she now asks for by name. I am a bad mother.), hello, that, mail.

New book she asks for by name: Fox in Socks. ("Socks Socks!")

Four new tricks:
(1) Holding my cell phone up to her ear and saying "'Lo!"
(2) Holding a tissue or napkin up to her face and making a blowing noise, as if blowing her nose.
(3) Playing along with "Two Little Monkeys" by tapping her head and shaking a lecturing finger at more-or-less the appropriate moments.
(4) Waving and saying "Bye!" for endings: finishing books, walking away from a cage at the zoo, leaving her toothbrush behind in the bathroom, having her star light turned off at night.

Comments

[janetmiles.livejournal.com]

(4) Waving and saying "Bye!" for endings: finishing books, walking away from a cage at the zoo, leaving her toothbrush behind in the bathroom, having her star light turned off at night.

Okay, this is just adorable.

[kightp.livejournal.com]

Seconded. I love these little updates in general, but this particular one has enormous "Awwwwwww" factor.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the first time we got to the end of a story and she solemnly waved goodbye, I just about died from the cuteness.

I started this, I think, because I have sometimes used "let's say goodbye to ___" as a way to help her manage transitions that might otherwise make her cry. But she has extended it way further than I ever imagined.

[tammylc.livejournal.com]

"Say goodbye to..." has been really wonderful around our household too. Miraculous, sometimes.

[ailsaek.livejournal.com]

Oh definitely. David does it too, and yup, just about died from the cuteness pretty much covers it. :)

[mactavish.livejournal.com]

#4 makes me all wibbly. :)

[therealjae.livejournal.com]

cake (mostly applied to rice cakes, also appears when playing pat-a-cake)

This is interesting. Babies generally don't do well with semantic ambiguity--I wonder how she parses this in her head.

-J

[rivka.livejournal.com]

She might just be echoing me when we're playing pat-a-cake.], and not connecting it with the object "cake." Or she might think that pat-a-cake is all about rice cakes. :-)

There's another example of this, actually. She says "'side" to mean "outside" - she'll use it when she wants to go outside, or when we actually leave the house. But also, another one of our little singing games has a verse that goes, "We sway from side to side, we sway from side to side..." Alex will say "side" and sort of lurch a little when we sing that part. Again, I don't know if she's just echoing me or if she's actually aware that there are two words that sound the same.

[therealjae.livejournal.com]

I suspect she wouldn't be saying the word--especially since she still has relatively few words--if she weren't trying to reason out the ambiguity. I bet she's trying to figure out what the identical meanings have in common. She probably does think pat-a-cake is all about rice cakes (which amuses me), but with the 'side' one, I would bet that she's actually starting to figure out that they mean different things.

Language acquisition is so cool.

-J

[therealjae.livejournal.com]

P.S. Don't be surprised if 'outside' actually turns into something that sounds more like 'outside' soon. :-)

[rivka.livejournal.com]

Language acquisition is so cool.

It is! I love watching it unfold. It's so neat when she makes a conceptual leap - like going from using "ball" to refer to specific toys to realizing that she can apply it to anything round. I wonder when she will learn that a "knee" exists separately from a hole in my jeans.

I'm also getting to watch two kids who are being brought up to be bilingual. My German friend at story hour says that right now her son uses "whichever word is easier," the English or the German. She speaks both to him, and I think his father does too. The other child isn't really saying any words yet. Her parents both speak English to each other and Spanish to her.

I have always wondered, when struggling to learn the gender of nouns in a foreign language, how little kids learn to apply them correctly. But now I've noticed that Dagmar labels things for Kai using the definite article, where I would just use the noun itself. So instead of pointing and saying "Buch," she says, "das Buch." So he learns it as part of the name, not as something separate that gets applied to names.

[raincitygirl.livejournal.com]

That makes sense. And yeah, little kids can soak up language like a sponge. My godmother's son and his wife live in Singapore, and have done so since their youngest was about Alex's age, and she's got tons of Mandarin words, and was in a Mandarin-speaking pre-school. Their older kids picked up some, but not nearly as fast. But they're still tons quicker at learning the language than their parents. I guess the older you get, the harder it is to learn a new language. I started French immersion in Grade 6, and my French is still pretty decent although I haven't used it in a long time (seems to get better after I have the need to use it triggered, of course), but I still *think* in English. Even when I was working in France and speaking French all the time, I wasn't really thinking in French.

Little kids who start French immersion in kindergarten seem to pick it up much faster, and will sometimes use the French word when they can't remember the English, even though they speak English at home. But a lot of the early immersion kids don't have a very good grasp on English grammar. They speak it just fine, but they never really got taught the structure in the way kids who are learning in their own language their first few years of school. When I hit high school the late immersion and early immersion kids took their classes together, and it was quite striking how many of them had trouble with fairly basic grammatical concepts. That may be the result of poor teaching, though, rather than an inherent weakness of getting an education in a foreign language.

My uncle who lives in a suburb of London has neighbours whose children grew up tri-lingual. The dad's Israeli and spoke to the kids in Hebrew, the mom's Palestinian and spoke to the kids in Arabic (which pretty much explains right there why they moved to England!), and they picked up English from TV and then having all their schooling in English. Apparently at home they just flip back and forth between the three languages pretty much seamlessly. And one of the kids is now an interpreter for the UN. I can't imagine thinking in three languages.

[perceval.livejournal.com]

That may be the result of poor teaching, though, rather than an inherent weakness of getting an education in a foreign language. I think it's poor teaching, actually. If you have a teacher who emphasises structure and teaches English like a "foreign language", you'd get completely different results.

[therealjae.livejournal.com]

Interesting that Dagmar uses the article when she's pointing something out. That'll only go so far, though, of course, since you have to learn how to modify the article depending on the case, so if you learn it as a chunked unit like that, you'll eventually start getting it wrong. :-)

What I've mostly noticed Grit and Frank doing is using words in a sentence. Like, instead of: "book, Laura, book," they'll say "see, Laura, that's a book." I don't know if that's just generally part of a "no baby talk" policy, though. I should ask them.

-J

[perceval.livejournal.com]

What I've mostly noticed Grit and Frank doing is using words in a sentence. Like, instead of: "book, Laura, book," they'll say "see, Laura, that's a book."

What is their intonation like when they say it? Mine is exaggerated, so I'm clearly using elements of motherese even though I'm using proper sentences ...

[therealjae.livejournal.com]

Hmm, I'm not sure. I'm pretty sure Frank doesn't have the motherese intonation, but Grit definitely does.

-J

[perceval.livejournal.com]

Ah, that's funny. We're raising our daughter to be trilingual (German parents, English all around her, Scottish Gaelic playgroup, then nursery and school later on). When I name things for her, they're usually in German (I almost never use English with her, and if I do, it's out of courtesy to other English-speaking mums I'm with). When I name, I usually just say the word, maybe sometimes prefaced with "Mummy's X". After naming an item, I often make a sentence with it, sometimes as simple as "Das ist ein Buch", which means that she'll get gender and case.

One other thing I notice is that I make the lax vowels such as the /I/ in milk more tense when I'm enunciating words for her. It's automatic, as well. Very strange, this instinct. My DH on the other hand, speaks to her in this extremely soft soothing voice.

[ailsaek.livejournal.com]

How old is she now? I forget. Those are all part of David's cuteness repertoire as well (only David blows raspberries into the tissue) and I was just wondering when a typical child does them. (And before someone jumps on me, in this instance, "typical" means "child who does not have Down Sydrome".)

And you are not a bad mom for letting her watch Blue's Clues. :) Have I fangeeked about The Backyardigans at you yet?

[rivka.livejournal.com]

She's 13 months old. The "imitating adult activities" stuff is almost all within the last month or so, and rapidly increasing.

[chargirlgenius.livejournal.com]

Awww!

I think LJ is better than a baby book for some of this.

[tammylc.livejournal.com]

The feedback loop is certainly more immediate!

[saoba.livejournal.com]

Tooooo cute! It must be genetic.

You know, the Divine Miss L had a huge thing for 'Blues Clues'. I used to tape it for her and it was one of the few things I would let her watch at that age. It was way back in the day, when it was Steve hosting and Blue was an animation puppy, which I'm told has changed.

I liked the way Steve interacted with the viewers, and I loved the fact the show was based on the idea that the toddlers watching were smart and were helping poor confused Steve. It was a sad day at my house when the Divine Miss L informed me she was too big for Steve, because he was 'very silly'.

She never really grew out of loving Mr Rogers, which is good because I haven't either.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

I have our TiVO set to record any rerun that has Steve in it, because I don't like Joe (the new host) nearly as much. (Although in the Joe episodes I've seen, Blue is still a cartoon dog.)

Alex has started to incorporate some of Steve's dance moves into her dancing style. It's the cutest thing you've ever seen.

[hobbitbabe.livejournal.com]

Yesterday we were enchanted at the yacht club by a toddler in red sneakers who seemed fascinated by the anchors attached to the bows of many of the boats pointing in to our dock. As zie walked down the dock, sie narrated zir trip as "Anko'...anko'...anko' ... big wed boat ... anko' ..." I'm not sure whether zie was commenting on our big red boat, or on the one next to it which is arguably bigger and redder.

We were also a bit troubled that the toddler was walking and running on the docks without a lifejacket, because the water is quite cold and because in my partner's experience it's better to start early with the ritual and expectation that docks mean lifejackets.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

We were also a bit troubled that the toddler was walking and running on the docks without a lifejacket, because the water is quite cold and because in my partner's experience it's better to start early with the ritual and expectation that docks mean lifejackets.

That would trouble me too. Even if the parent is holding the toddler's hand, they're just so damn fast at that age.

[hobbitbabe.livejournal.com]

They weren't always holding onto the toddler, and when they were it was mostly onto zir hooded sweatshirt which doesn't look like as secure a grip as, say, the back of overalls.

Another way that I'm a real parent: now I guess I've become one of those Parents of Older Kids who can act disapproving because We Didn't Do It That Way!

[hobbitbabe.livejournal.com]

New Words: [...] mail

The hard-copy kind? That just strikes me as funny, that Alex might know about the kind of mail that she can chew on when it comes to the door or can drop into the blue mailbox, and that she might not know about the kind on the computer yet.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

Heh. Yes, it's a little bit anachronistic, isn't it? She actually has her own basket of junk mail, which she loves to play with.

[raincitygirl.livejournal.com]

(4) Waving and saying "Bye!" for endings: finishing books, walking away from a cage at the zoo, leaving her toothbrush behind in the bathroom, having her star light turned off at night.

So adorable my ovaries started hurting. I love toddler logic. I mean, when you think about it, saying bye to a toothbrush or a book does make sense, but we don't usually think about it. So how old is she now: fourteen months?

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

Try "elbow." Sarah picked that one up the first time I said it to her. Hm, Alex is getting up to the youngest age we ever saw Sarah at.

[juthwara.livejournal.com]

What an accomplished (and adorable!) young lady! This is such an exciting stage, isn't it? It seems like they develop a new skill every day.

refers to the TV show "Blue's Clues," which she now asks for by name. I am a bad mother

It could be worse. Through daycare, K has developed a passion for Barney. Ugh. Thankfully, she has no clue that the tv here could play Barney too and she's not about to learn it from me.

[adrian-turtle.livejournal.com]

Alex sounds perfectly adorable. I'm so glad you're sharing this with us, and I'm smiling at the idea of you showing it to a grown-up Alex someday.

It really is fun to watch her catch on to language, and the way one word can mean different things. Alex is starting to catch on to the range of "bye" and "cake." When the little girl I love was a bit older (14 or 15 months old), I pointed out a wren to her, or maybe it was a finch. "Do you see the little bird over there?" "Ooo! Little bird!" Then she craned around in her stroller to ask me, with real concern, "Where Mommy bird?"