When babies are learning to speak, do they make sense to themselves? Penny talks and talks, but she speaks in a language I can't interpret. She has prosody and inflection, and seems to be stringing 4 nonsensical words together, with the occasional "Uh-oh," thrown in for good measure.
Penny: "Uh-oh, dohdogdohdoggoi Eesh."
Me: "Oh, yeah?"
Penny: "Dohdogdohgoi, doh-doi-doh. Eeeh. Uh-oh!"
Me: "Really? Please continue!"
I believe this is called variegated babbling, not reduplicated babbling, which she still does, as in: "Da-DA! Da-DA! Da-DA!" For the record, she only says "Mama" when she's sad, never as an inspired chant.
Penny's been trying to sing the alphabet, and "itsy-bitsy spider." She sings in monotone, but you can tell by the timing of her syllables (or hand motions) what she's getting at. She could hear either song 100 times and never tire of it. (I beg to differ). But singing is also a good way to calm her down, so I often bust out the "Elmo's World" theme while trimming her nails, combing her hair, and brushing her teeth, which are all activities she finds particularly aggravating and insulting.
She also enjoys scolding the cats, which I'm ashamed to report she learned from me, because I'm usually yelling at Chupa when she tries to escape out the front door, as in, "No, No, Chupa!" Now, when we pull into the driveway, Penny starts shouting "No, No, No!" Poor kitty, she will forever be scolded. I think Penny obtains a certain level of satisfaction from bossing someone around. Fortunately, Chupa has a sense of humor bordering on acerbic, and more or less puts up with it.
The other day, we were walking through a parking lot, and Penny could see her shadow on the ground in front of her. We started dancing and kicking up one leg at a time, which made our shadows move in a comical fashion, and she thought it was the funniest thing she'd ever seen. Although, I'm sure the sight of our "dancing" would have been amusing by itself. She imitated us by picking up one foot, then the other, laughing at her shadow. But then she tried to walk around it, and when she realized she couldn't, she became a little unnerved. Unhinged, actually.
The last entertaining observation of the week is that Penny is developing opinions about food instead of serenely accepting everything I put in front of her. Further, she has caught the vision of sleeping all night, 10-11 hours straight. So she's gone from being a good eater and a mediocre sleeper to being an ok eater and a great sleeper. For now. Of course, now that I have jinxed myself, something completely different will happen tomorrow.
(I'm cheating a little, because these pictures are from June and are pre-haircut).
Over and out.
2 comments:
I'm sure Penny makes perfect sense to herself! I love the "uh-oh"s she throws in - I wonder what she's uh-ohing!
Oh poor kitty, being scolded so often (I think cats are used to it, our cats are in trouble 50% of the time). George keep screaming in a really shrill voice - it's almost a kind of singing - and whenever face-to-face with the cat, he seems to squeal the loudest. Haha, poor Bobo.
ps: your twitter updates are locked which means that when you load your blog, a password popup thing appears because you've probably got yr twitter updates in the sidebar even though Twitter is locked. Hope that makes sense. xx
Thanks for the heads up RE twitter. Ugh! I was getting so much spam I had to block my profile.
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