Word balloons

My wife recently took our son for his two-year-old checkup at the pediatrician and the doctor spent part of the appointment asking the little guy direct questions in an effort to assess his verbal development. She was working uphill, though, for a couple of reasons. One, the little guy does tend to get shy, which in his case means quietly watchful, around people he isn’t super familiar with, doubly compounded by not being someplace he considers his turf (like home or day care – excuse me, “preschool” now that he’s officially into the 2-yr-old room). Two, the doctor was asking the little guy to name things in a book that my wife had brought along to keep him amused in the waiting room … but the book was a brand new birthday present (a Disney Robin Hood hardback, oo-de-lally!)and thus its interior contents were libra incognita, as it were.


Despite not getting much more than a few meek “huh?”s from the patient, the doctor wasn’t perturbed and in fact reassured my wife that he would probably be stringing together words on his own fairly soon. My wife took this extremely graciously, not bothering to correct the doctor or explain that our pride and joy is, under normal circumstances, a conversational delight. My wife and I fall prey to numerous parental anxieties but our child’s speech development is nowhere on that list.

In fact, lately if we talk about the little guy’s speaking abilities at all it’s more to sigh wistfully as one element after another of his babytalk falls out of use. Case in point, the other night as I was giving him his bath he started playing with the cup I use to rinse shampoo out of his hair and he filled it up, then looked at me and said, “I wanna pour out the water?” Which on the one hand was kind of remarkable because he said it questioningly and implied he was asking permission, a welcome breakthrough indicator that he is getting a sense that he’s not automatically allowed to do any old thing that pops into his little head. But also, he used the word “pour”. The first word he learned that meant “gravity-assisted transfer of something from one container to another” was “dump” as in, of course, “dump truck” (one of his first loves) and not much later “dump out all the toys” (also near and dear to his heart). So he used that word in an all-purpose way even when he started speaking more or less in sentences, which meant it was not unusual to hear him say “Dump the milk in this cup!” when we were getting him a drink. Not exactly proper English, but not exactly a major impediment to understanding, either, which meant we left it alone and only corrected him gently if at all. It was cute and we let it stand, which seems to be the guiding rule. But apparently he finally caught on that there were other words for “dump” and that “pour” is the accepted usage for liquids. It really is mind-boggling the way kids just pick this stuff up without formal instruction. But a little bittersweet, too, because the oddities of the learning process are cute and the regularization, not so much.

But it’s not all cats-in-the-cradle megrims. The trade-off, as you might expect, is that he comes up with new, hilarious stuff to say all the time. At dinner time last night, it was just he and I while his mother was still at work,a nd I was puttering around the kitchen while he finished his dinner at the table, and at one point I stopped in the middle of the kitchen and untucked my dress shirt. To which my son for some reason felt compelled to say, “Lookin’ handsome, Daddy!” And that’s not a phrase my wife and I throw around at home, at all, ever, so where it came from is anyone’s guess. Cute, though.