“What are the girls saying these days?” you ask. I share below.
I hope I’m not giving C. a complex. She has a small group of words that she pronounces incorrectly. She also has kind of a funny little voice, so when she makes her mispronunciations, it makes me laugh. And then I repeat them back to her, in a silly voice. Something tells me this is going to come back to haunt me when we have to pay for her therapy someday.
I’m not sure if you’ll get the full effect through text (I need to try to get these on video) but here is a list of words she mispronounces right now.
Mnyah Mnyah. That, of course, is oatmeal. I’m really bad about this one. After she says it once, I’ll walk around the kitchen saying, “C.’s having mnyah mnyah! Who wants mnyah mnyah?” and so on. Usually she starts screaming, “NOOOOO!” at me, but in a playful way.
Pineyar. This is a computer. S. was working on our taxes today, and our previous years are on my computer. So she had my MacBook Pro in her lap with her Dell next to her. C. liked that a lot. “Mom, you have two pineyars. Daddy’s pineyar wit dah apple on it, and your pineyar right dere.”
Yogrit. This one comes from M.’s mispronunciation. I like it when we only have one container of yogurt left and they start fighting over who gets it. “I asked for yogrit first!” “No, I want the last yogrit!”
Girled cheese. Another one learned from M.. I’m not sure what you do to cheese when you girl it, but they both like it on a sandwich.
Beyond those, she’s in the phase where almost everything she says is unintentionally funny. It’s that very verbal kid who isn’t quite three stage. She’s losing the baby talk and having longer conversations typical of an older kid. But there are always some quirks there that remind us that she is still two.
She tends to get hung up on stuff. There’s a boy in her class that I’ll call Justin.* Apparently he hit her way back in the fall. No big deal, and knowing C., she probably took a toy from him or something to provoke it. But every freaking day when I pick her up from school, she tells me that Justin hit her. If you ask her about school. “Justin hit me. Dat not berry nice.” The worst was when she was saying this while Justin and his mom were about three feet from us. I hustled her out the door without looking back to see if the mom had heard anything.
(Not his real name.)
Her latest thing has been to talk about one of M.’s classmates constantly. M. loves to make pictures for her friends. One day she was making lots of pics for her friend Cathy Barnes.** That got stuck in C.’s head, I guess, because for the past week everything has been about Cathy Barnes. She makes her own pictures for her. She talks about things they do together. She finds a way to include her in every conversation.
M. is not a good sport about it at all. She is in a bossy phase anyway and this is just another chance for her to correct C.. She got fed up yesterday, though. “C., Cathy Barnes isn’t even your friend. Stop talking about her!” C. just said, “Oh yeah! OK!” very sweetly. And then went back to talking about Cathy Barnes. It makes me laugh.
(Again not her name. And since there are two Cathys in M.’s class, she always gets the last name attached.)
Finally, anytime C. sees a commercial for Chuck E. Cheese, she starts jumping up and down and screaming “Chuck E. Cheese!” like it’s her favorite place in the world. She’s never been there. She just heard M. talk about it after a birthday party last year and apparently thinks it is heaven on earth. I hope she hasn’t built it up too much so that she’s disappointed when she gets a turn to go.
(The childcare room in our gym has some of those tunnels that are hung from the ceiling like they have at Chuck’s. Am I the only parent totally grossed out by those? Surely they aren’t sending some adult up there to clean them out every day. Blech.)