Before our kids learn our language, we get to experience the magic of learning theirs.
For an amazing, and amazingly short, period of time kids speak a language that only their parents can understand.
Have you ever been around a parent and their kid, and the kid looks at the parent and says, “Samoopeeepoop clababa pano pano it,” and the parent, completely un-phased, replies with something like “No dear, you’ve had enough graham-crackers, and dinner is in an hour?”
I’m going to miss that connection with my kid. I like that for awhile my wife and I were the only ones who could understand her. But now, Duchess is getting much better at talking. Her language skills are really pretty amazing. She’s almost mastered subject, object and possessive pronouns. She’s getting tenses down, and every once in awhile she’ll put together a sentence with multiple clauses and a semi-colon.
“I want to lay in bed with you and mommy, who you call Stevie-pie, but I peed in my pull up and need a new butt; can you change it?”
Yes, it should be lie and not lay, but cut her some slack. She’s two. So before Duchess starts quoting Faulkner and writes a fan-fiction sequel to The Sound and the Fury, I decided now would be a good time to write down some of the Duchessisms that are slowly fading away from her mind, like the end of Flowers for Algernon*, only in reverse… which, now that I think about it, would be the beginning of Flowers for Algernon. I digress.
10 Words I’m Going to Miss
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I was chatting away with my 16 year old son the other day. We were in the car and stopped at a railway crossing waiting for the train. He turned to me and grinned and said, "I love waiting for the ning ning". I turned to him and burst out laughing. When he was little and we used to visit my aunty (who lived right next to a railyway crossing) EVERY SINGLE TIME the boom gates came down and the bells went off, he would yell "see the ning ning, see the ning ning" and one of us would have to scoop him up and carry him outside so he could see the train woosh past (every 10 minutes). He called the train the ning ning because that's what the warning bells sounded like to him. I had COMPLETELY forgotten about it and that moment in the car with my nearly adult son saying "ning ning"...well, that was just priceless.
Some of my faves:
brippery - slippery, as in 'The bath is all brippery!
oddage - orange (still used by the family)
wetting - wedding
trombolone - toblerone
browd - brown
'I all nut tree' (when wrinkly fingers from the bath)
Ahh so cute! It's funny how you become sad when they start saying them properly.