Three Shots of a Developing Girl
parenting
In Thought
The Girl looks more and more like a young lady and less and less like a baby every day.
Words
L has begun talking. Single words, mixing Polish and English, but words all the time.
“More” is “ma,” often with the accompanying baby sign.
“Shoes” is “shas.” We discovered only yesterday that she’d learned that word when she was walking about with one of her shoes in her hand, trying to get one of us to put it back on.
“Ba” or “baba” can be a number of things. First it was banana. Then it became her name for our cat. It’s become so ubiquitous that, when in doubt, we refer to something as “ba.”
Of course, “dac” has been around for some time now.
Most of the words she speaks are English, but she understands both English and Polish. The dominance of English is an obvious function of living in the States, but I could help the matter by speaking more Polish at home.
Dac!
Communication
The Girl of late has been doing a lot to shake up my notions of what it means to communicate and all the different ways it's possible to share a thought with another person.
The biggest preconception she's radically challenged is the age at which an individual can create novel ways of communicating. We've been using baby signing with L, and she's picked up on several signs that she uses regularly now: eat, more, and bath are among them. She understands a lot more -- sleep, drink, potty/diaper change -- but that's not terribly impressive in that she already understands a great deal of spoken language. What shocked me recently about the signing was that L created her own sign for a word that she understands: swing. She waves her right arm back and forth at about shoulder level when she wants to go swing -- which is pretty much constantly.
Another preconception: the ability to speak develops much later in children raised in a multilingual environment than it does in a monolingual home. L has a few words that she uses to great effect.
- dac ("give", pronounced "dach")
- tam ("there", pronounced more or less as it appears)
- down
She's got a few more that she almost says, and at least one L-ism: "baaa" is bannana.
But her understanding of both Polish and English is amazing. We ask her many things in both Polish and English and she understands them both unhesitatingly.
All this culminates in the last unexpected change: an increase in crying. She knows what is possible with communication now -- in a word, everything -- but she lacks the skills to tell us everything she wants or needs. And the resulting frustration manifests itself in crying/screaming fits more often than we'd like.
The developments of the last few weeks, though, promise a quick end to these fits. In other words, the problem is the solution.
Slide
We took the Girl back to the park, where she went down the slide on her own for the first time.
Hesitant at first, she was soon zooming down on her own.
Entertaining the Girl, Part III: The Swing
Pasta and Corn
Snack!
Bath
The Girl has had a love-hate relationship with the bath.
She generally liked it until recently. There was a time when she hated it; this was because she had been sick for a while and simply hadn't had a bath for a couple of weeks. Once we got back into the routine, though, she started liking it again. She wasn't eager to get in, but she caused no problems; she wasn't eager to get out, but she didn't fuss.
No more.
Now she loves it. And getting her out can result in one upset Girl. Bath time is play time -- and she'll play with just about anything.
