Communication Part 1
The flood of Barney and me updates continues unabated…. apologies to all reader(s) who have struggled to keep up with the flow.
Landmark day – a few mornings ago Barney said for the first time “I love you, daddy” and gave me a big cuddle. Unfortunately this was the morning he also whacked me in the eye and knocked my contact lens out, which I inevitably knelt on while trying to stop him walking about and breaking it, so there is a certain jarring inconsistency between his words and deeds at the moment. Still, it was nice to hear.
Anyway, it’s clearly high time I wrote something about his exploding communication skills.
He’s been talking for a while now but he’s always been a good communicator so we never really considered any of the baby sign language courses that are around these days. Pointing and grunting worked well from when he was little – (and Barney got by too! b’dum tish!) and if we tried to pass him the wrong thing he could impatiently waggle his hand in ways that meant “No, a little to the left,” “No, the one behind – no, behind it! Yes, that’s it” and “Do I have to come over there myself?” and so on. He never really got frustrated at being unable to express himself and picked up a few useful words* at an early age with any missing words compensated for by an amazingly rich vocabulary of tone-of-voice, with several tones irreproducible in the adult world but rich with meaning. Such as answering a question he doesn’t know the answer to with a firm but jolly “Hmmm”, or a questioning “Yeeesss?” not unlike the encouraging noises an elderly aunt might make to pretend she can hear you and please do carry on. I like to think it’s following in a great Coulter tradition of giving authoritative yet on closer examination reliably equivocal answers to questions we really don’t know the answers to.
And now he’s talking non-stop.
* Such as cheese, please and yes.
Since he was tiny Barney would wake up pretty early and entertain himself in his cot, babbling away. We’d lie in bed laughing but also trying to get back to sleep for a precious extra 10 minutes or so (we figured if we got him up whenever he woke he’d just keep getting earlier until eventually he’d be doing shift-work, which isn’t what we wanted for him).
A few months ago we could recognise tunes he was singing (as he lay in his cot) but not really the words – now the words are absolutely clear. And we sat on a bench on the way home the other week to sing Bob the Builder, although he only knows the first verse and chorus. Have we been remiss in not giving him enough TV opportunities to learn verse 2? It’s so hard to tell. I’m as impressed by his ability to hold a tune as much as the words to be honest – the boy has a bright future in karaoke!
His earliest words were of course no and yes (preceded briefly by yeah and followed for about 1 day by a cowboy-like yep) but with lots of different intonations. My favourite was probably the occasions when he would walk up to me and with me sitting down, maybe on the step to the kitchen, put one hand on my shoulder, bend over and peer into my face to emphatically say “Yes”. Just to be sure I got the message. There’s no sincerity quite as sincere as the sincerity of a toddler.
Soon after he acquired short phrases like “Oh no!” if he dropped something, usually deliberately and often accompanied by covering his face and grinning (this wasn’t one of his sincere moments), and the related “oh dear!” as well as “oh wow” and the sometimes appropriate “bless you”. The whole sneeze-bless-you thing made him laugh though so he would say “again” to make us do fake sneezes so he could say it and laugh at it again. Another early favourite was “Ulp me”, a very slightly shorter version of “help me” often followed by “Mummy / Daddy do it”, possibly with his arms lifted over his head so we knew we were meant to carry him somewhere. Sometimes the lesser spotted “Barney do it”. Now he just says “I want daddy carry me”.
Sentences started to get more complex, although without any real grammar, such as “stay play mummy daddy house” which since were getting him ready for nursery at the time tugged at the heartstrings a bit. When he first came out with sentences like “I want new book” we were thrilled almost as much as we were appalled by his rampant materialism.
Meanwhile “Let’s go” is a favourite along with “Come on, Daddy” usually delivered in a plaintive tone and accompanied by an outstretched hand to take me to the living room where the toys are gathered. It’s not impatient exactly yet somehow manages to sound as if he’s already asked a hundred times and he’s being very patient to ask again – the hand is in case I can’t find my own way, I think
The real reason for making this entry is because there’s something rather wonderful about every new sentence at the moment, whether it shows a new word used correctly, a piece of grammar assimilated or just an amusingly grown-up phrase coming out in his lovely, tiny voice. And we suddenly realised that at some point soon, it won’t be so amazing that he’s just said an interesting sentence, it will be expected. Right now seems like a magical time full of new words and realisations that his use of them signals a fresh thing understood and for us a new snapshot of the inside of his head. I wanted to capture that emerging voice before I forgot how extraordinary it is, now that we finally have an idea what he’s actually thinking (incidentally, a friend of mine once told me that he was desperate for his kids to start talking so he knew what was going on in their world. But then he found out that it was actually very boring. I’m still loving it but then the “Why”s haven’t started yet). I'm sure this will be followed by short entries only me and Rach will love saying "Today he said this and it was so funny!" Apologies in advance to my other reader.
Plus the other reason, to record the first time Barney spontaneously told me he loved me. It could be argued that he doesn’t know exactly what it means yet but it's hard to deny that I’m on the right track if I’ve been put in the same select company as Mousey, Iggle Piggle and Macca Pacca.
Now that it’s in print I’ll always have it to point to when he’s telling me that he hates me just because I won’t let him stay up past midnight to watch Saw vs Jaws, Part II: The Sharpest Tooth, or The Evil Dead meet The Living Dead: They Call Out for Pizza! or even Aliens vs Predator 45: The Revenge of Michael Jackson (surely no-one will believe he was real in 20 years time?).
Landmark day – a few mornings ago Barney said for the first time “I love you, daddy” and gave me a big cuddle. Unfortunately this was the morning he also whacked me in the eye and knocked my contact lens out, which I inevitably knelt on while trying to stop him walking about and breaking it, so there is a certain jarring inconsistency between his words and deeds at the moment. Still, it was nice to hear.
Anyway, it’s clearly high time I wrote something about his exploding communication skills.
He’s been talking for a while now but he’s always been a good communicator so we never really considered any of the baby sign language courses that are around these days. Pointing and grunting worked well from when he was little – (and Barney got by too! b’dum tish!) and if we tried to pass him the wrong thing he could impatiently waggle his hand in ways that meant “No, a little to the left,” “No, the one behind – no, behind it! Yes, that’s it” and “Do I have to come over there myself?” and so on. He never really got frustrated at being unable to express himself and picked up a few useful words* at an early age with any missing words compensated for by an amazingly rich vocabulary of tone-of-voice, with several tones irreproducible in the adult world but rich with meaning. Such as answering a question he doesn’t know the answer to with a firm but jolly “Hmmm”, or a questioning “Yeeesss?” not unlike the encouraging noises an elderly aunt might make to pretend she can hear you and please do carry on. I like to think it’s following in a great Coulter tradition of giving authoritative yet on closer examination reliably equivocal answers to questions we really don’t know the answers to.
And now he’s talking non-stop.
* Such as cheese, please and yes.
Since he was tiny Barney would wake up pretty early and entertain himself in his cot, babbling away. We’d lie in bed laughing but also trying to get back to sleep for a precious extra 10 minutes or so (we figured if we got him up whenever he woke he’d just keep getting earlier until eventually he’d be doing shift-work, which isn’t what we wanted for him).
A few months ago we could recognise tunes he was singing (as he lay in his cot) but not really the words – now the words are absolutely clear. And we sat on a bench on the way home the other week to sing Bob the Builder, although he only knows the first verse and chorus. Have we been remiss in not giving him enough TV opportunities to learn verse 2? It’s so hard to tell. I’m as impressed by his ability to hold a tune as much as the words to be honest – the boy has a bright future in karaoke!
His earliest words were of course no and yes (preceded briefly by yeah and followed for about 1 day by a cowboy-like yep) but with lots of different intonations. My favourite was probably the occasions when he would walk up to me and with me sitting down, maybe on the step to the kitchen, put one hand on my shoulder, bend over and peer into my face to emphatically say “Yes”. Just to be sure I got the message. There’s no sincerity quite as sincere as the sincerity of a toddler.
Soon after he acquired short phrases like “Oh no!” if he dropped something, usually deliberately and often accompanied by covering his face and grinning (this wasn’t one of his sincere moments), and the related “oh dear!” as well as “oh wow” and the sometimes appropriate “bless you”. The whole sneeze-bless-you thing made him laugh though so he would say “again” to make us do fake sneezes so he could say it and laugh at it again. Another early favourite was “Ulp me”, a very slightly shorter version of “help me” often followed by “Mummy / Daddy do it”, possibly with his arms lifted over his head so we knew we were meant to carry him somewhere. Sometimes the lesser spotted “Barney do it”. Now he just says “I want daddy carry me”.
Sentences started to get more complex, although without any real grammar, such as “stay play mummy daddy house” which since were getting him ready for nursery at the time tugged at the heartstrings a bit. When he first came out with sentences like “I want new book” we were thrilled almost as much as we were appalled by his rampant materialism.
Meanwhile “Let’s go” is a favourite along with “Come on, Daddy” usually delivered in a plaintive tone and accompanied by an outstretched hand to take me to the living room where the toys are gathered. It’s not impatient exactly yet somehow manages to sound as if he’s already asked a hundred times and he’s being very patient to ask again – the hand is in case I can’t find my own way, I think
The real reason for making this entry is because there’s something rather wonderful about every new sentence at the moment, whether it shows a new word used correctly, a piece of grammar assimilated or just an amusingly grown-up phrase coming out in his lovely, tiny voice. And we suddenly realised that at some point soon, it won’t be so amazing that he’s just said an interesting sentence, it will be expected. Right now seems like a magical time full of new words and realisations that his use of them signals a fresh thing understood and for us a new snapshot of the inside of his head. I wanted to capture that emerging voice before I forgot how extraordinary it is, now that we finally have an idea what he’s actually thinking (incidentally, a friend of mine once told me that he was desperate for his kids to start talking so he knew what was going on in their world. But then he found out that it was actually very boring. I’m still loving it but then the “Why”s haven’t started yet). I'm sure this will be followed by short entries only me and Rach will love saying "Today he said this and it was so funny!" Apologies in advance to my other reader.
Plus the other reason, to record the first time Barney spontaneously told me he loved me. It could be argued that he doesn’t know exactly what it means yet but it's hard to deny that I’m on the right track if I’ve been put in the same select company as Mousey, Iggle Piggle and Macca Pacca.
Now that it’s in print I’ll always have it to point to when he’s telling me that he hates me just because I won’t let him stay up past midnight to watch Saw vs Jaws, Part II: The Sharpest Tooth, or The Evil Dead meet The Living Dead: They Call Out for Pizza! or even Aliens vs Predator 45: The Revenge of Michael Jackson (surely no-one will believe he was real in 20 years time?).
posted by nickcoulter at 4:00 pm
1 Comments:
Thanks for some quality points there. I am kind of new to online , so I printed this off to put in my file, any better way to go about keeping track of it then printing?
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