My wife Meg and I have a normal morning routine. Usually we’re up at about the same time getting ready for work, and prepping our 1-year-old son Jamie for leaving the house.
Part of this ritual includes making a bottle. We have a bottle warmer, which has actually saved us a ton of time. It heats the bottle, and as it is done, it beeps. The other morning I heated one, before Jamie was fully awake. He hadn’t made any noises in his room indicating he was awake, but we needed to keep the schedule moving.
As the warmer beeped in the kitchen, he screamed “Ba!” over and over from the nursery down the hall. We can draw two conclusions from this incident: One, it is scary what he can hear from behind his closed door, and Meg and I will need to keep that in mind. Two, our Pavlovian training is complete.
Jamie is definitely becoming more aware of his surroundings, and he’s trying more and more to talk. This means toddler talk, which I’ve never been a huge fan of, but I’ve found it more of an alluring force than I originally thought it might be.
It’s harder than I thought for us not to refer to his bottle as his ba. It quickly becomes habit-forming. The problem with this, as I see it, is that we start speaking his language, instead of him speaking ours.
As Jamie develops, it’s interesting to determine what qualifies as a new word, and what comes out as mere gibberish. He’s starting to string long sentences and paragraphs together verbally, but none of it makes any sense whatsoever.
He does have a couple other words he’s picked up lately. He began pointing at the ceilings and saying something that sounded like “that.” After quite a bit of discerning, he actually is saying “light.”
He also has a toy that says “hola,” and he’s started repeating that as well. At first it sounded more like a karate chop (Haaaaaaya), but it has progressed to the actual word. I’m pretty sure mastering this word qualifies him as bilingual, since he knows almost as much Spanish as he does English.
The struggle for me has been not resorting to speaking his language. I thought I’d be strong enough to coach the conversation through this stage of development. But it is amazing how quickly you adapt to his world, and find yourself calling things what he calls them. The goal is to be more insistent about it than he is, so that he learns over time.
So I try to say “bottle” to help him figure it out. The word “ball” also sounds the same as bottle. So at times I’ve pointed to each to try and coach him through the difference. Now he’ll say “baaaaaaaaw” when referring to the round object.
Having a kid really is all-encompassing. It can be extremely difficult to just shut it off when you leave the house for something unrelated.
Helping Jamie develop will have its positives for Meg and I. We’ll no longer be “that couple” walking into a social setting with a bullseye on our back that says “new parents.” You know the couple. You’ve seen the couple. Maybe they’re talking in 2-year-old talk, without their 2-year-old present. Maybe they need prompting to realize that as they have been parenting, the world has kept spinning. Getting discovered in a crowd as “that couple” usually elicits looks from non-parent random strangers like you have three heads.
I’m torn between the reality that everything that has come out of my kid’s mouth to date is incredibly cute, and the idea that we’ll be the ones who need to coach him through development.
I’m sure toddler talk is something I will eventually get sick of. Just not today.
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