Children's poetry

Maybe it’s because I’m feeling guilty for skipping blogging on Friday, but let’s start this week with a confession: my wife and I, some time ago, started keeping a spreadsheet to track all of the words we could reasonably claim that our little guy Batyr has command of, meaning that he can pronounce them at least quasi-recognizably either on command or spontaneously. This is not only a fairly nerdy thing to do, but also equal parts prideful and shameful.

It honestly started out as the satisfaction of idle curiosity. Let me set the scene by explaining that there are three computers in our house: an aging desktop that sits upstairs in the spare bedroom and is rarely used, but supports the hardwired cable internet connection and the wireless router. Then there’s the slightly-less-antiquated laptop which is usually sitting on the dining room table, plugged into the wall for power but picking up the internet connection wirelessly; we also recently got a very small wireless netbook (it was a free gift from our cable provider) which floats around (not literally) from room to room due to its superior battery life. The laptop is where we maintain the spreadsheet, when we think of it, because the laptop’s dining room location is ideally situated in the corner of the house with the kitchen on one side and Batyr’s playroom on another. The three of us spend a lot of time in that part of the house, and the laptop is usually on for e-mail or Facebook or scoreboard-checking, so it’s really no trouble to open Excel when Batyr says something new and add another word in a new cell.

I love me some lists, and I can sometimes be wildly inaccurate in estimating things, so when Batyr’s vocabulary really seemed to be growing fast my wife and I would sometimes look at each other and say “How many words do you think he knows?” and no ready answer was forthcoming. But between the two of us, his mother and I were able to rattle off all the things we knew he said on a regular basis, and when you do that in Excel, one item per row, then you have an automatic count. Question answered. And of course the answer is going to change over time, but Excel makes that easy too, since you can click to re-sort the list and make sure you aren’t counting the same word twice and so on.


I’m trying really hard to justify this elaborate word-accounting system as not at all elaborate, really just a software-assisted trifle, because I know deep in my heart that this is all No Big Deal. My wife and I are both pretty verbal, expressive people, lovers of literature, admirers of deft wordplay, so on the one hand we hope that Batyr will turn out the same as us but on the other hand, how could he not? We talk to him and to each other in front of him constantly, we’ve read to him since he came home from the hospital, he has our genes; there aren’t many automatic givens in this world, but Batyr developing into a wordy child might be one of them. And thus the rest is all just details, and who cares if Batyr starts talking early or late, if his vocabulary is large or small for his age according to the literature at the pediatrician’s office? By the time he’s smuggling a flashlight into his room to read past lights-out, or asking us imponderable etymological questions, are we going to remember, or even care, how many months and weeks old he was when he put together his first complete proto-sentence?

But be that as it may, my wife and I are both cut from the same cloth in that once a question occurs to us (of the answerable, non-imponderable type) it tends to itch our respective brains until we answer it. Especially when said question initially emerges in the form of musing along the lines of “he’s saying so much now, he must know 50 different words” which is immediately followed by second guessing: does it seem like 50 because it seems like a lot and 50 is a number roughly equivalent to “a lot”? Are we overestimating because we have fallen into the clichéd pitfall of first-time parents who think their super-special precious little snowflake is the most amazing iteration of the human experience ever unleashed? So in that sense, answering the question became as much a reality check, a brakes-application in the face of the beaming and bursting we simultaneously mock in ourselves and more than occasionally revel in. And then it turned out, at the time, yeah he was right around 50 operating signifiers in his speech, thanks for the autocount, Excel … and of course once that round of typing was done it was agin no big deal to save the file, and add to it as time went on, just for curiosity. Maybe also for conversation fodder with the grandparents.

And also it’s tremendous fun to marvel at his precocious language acquisition and there’s really no point in denying that, either.

Of course here I am trying to make my peace with this aspect of parental vanity, right at the junction where it’s about to become a moot point. Because I noticed over the past few days that Batyr is most likely on the cusp of a veritable communication explosion. Three big examples:

1. He’s figuring out compound words. Or at least the idea behind them, which means he can make up his own compound words, and that’s pretty hilarious. But it also functionally blows out his vocabulary by a couple of orders of magnitude, by turning his words list into his words list squared: he knows “dog” and he knows “bowl” and he also knows that “dog bowl” is something different from his own bowl. I, personally, just really like the idea of being able to differentiate and specify things without confusion (arguably this is really one of the running themes of my life as a whole). It also leads to some quality ridiculousness like “water hat” which is what I resorted to as a Koko-sign-language-esque description of “rinsing shampoo off your head” and which , improbably enough, actually worked. Batyr hated the scalp-rinsing part of bathtime until I started referring to it as “water hat”, which he could repeat and understand and that made it cool, apparently.

2. He’s getting better at mimicking complicated words. I’ve never been hyper-obsessed with urging Batyr to say what I say, just to see if he can, but this past weekend I gave it a go while we were playing with his toy toolset. I’m not sure “screwdriver” belongs on the vocabulary-mastery spreadsheet quite yet, but he did give sounding it out a solid try with moderate success. It’s funny and cute to hear big words come out of such a tiny mouth, however garbled, but at the same time it’s a little unsettling because the evidence seems to be there that he could repeat back just about anything I said, if he wanted to. When exactly he’ll really start to want to is anybody’s guess, but it feels imminent. And that means I really need to start watching what I say, because I’ll inevitably hear it again.

3. He’s starting to realize that language is funny and abstract. On Sunday morning Batyr was barefooted and my wife commented on his cold feet. The little guy’s response: “Cold feet? Cold feet goldfish!” I enjoy a good bit of absurdity as much as the next guy (even and/or especially when the next guy is nineteen months old) but what really tickled me was that he made the association with goldfish, which had no context in the conversation whatsoever, just because “cold” rhymes with “gold” and “feet” sounds kind of like “fish” and “cold feet” thus reminded him of a completely different word he knows. It is of course highly likely that I am extensively overthinking this and even more likely that Batyr was just free associating out loud motivated by some very primitive neural feedback in the language center of the brain, but then again, at the end of the day, maybe that’s true of everyone who’s ever turned a clever phrase or constructed a memorable bit of poetry.

It’s all just words (in many senses) and it’s yet another thing that every kid (and by association, every parent) goes through. But that does not change the fact that my kid is going through it now and I am happily, utterly caught up in it.