Moon? Day?

At the same time, my little one has been growing up fast. Earlier on, if I went away for a couple of days, she would look different when I returned. Now, she is learning more and more words so that whenever I get back from a trip I notice that she is saying things she didn’t use to. Unfortunately, due to my various absences her English is not getting as much work as it ought to so that she says most things in the other language, even when talking to me or to people who only know English. Still, she knows the words in English, too, as is evident when you speak to her. And she does a great job of explaining that there is no moon in the sky but there is the sun so that it must be day, i.e. she says things like “Moon? No, no moon. Sun. Now. Day. Yes. Day. No moon.” In fact, she has reached the stage where she talks all the time, mostly to herself. No wonder there is a line of thinking which says that thought is just fully internalised speech. The other day she even sat down and started telling herself the story of Snow White while looking at the book. Didn’t hear exactly what she said, unfortunately. One thing I have been doing is getting her to talk into my mobile every few weeks and saving the sound files with her age on them. Some of them are very cool and will certainly annoy the hell out of her when she is older. But she will get to love them when she is much older, I am sure.

I have been on the watch for sentence structure in what she is saying and she does appear to be making inroads. She clearly has negation down pat. And sometimes she even seems to have the subject-verb pair going, i.e. Dada run. The best was what she said after we didn’t let her do something – Mama no good! I got off scot free.