It has been far too long since the last Ellie update --- re-reading it now, it seems like ancient history. This long hiatus has not been for lack of things to tell, or lack of desire to tell them. However, while we feel as though we are able to manage the parenting thing OK, the combination of being parents *and* trying to do our jobs is proving quite a challenge.
This update, like the last one, is mostly about language, since that is where the most exciting action has been since last September. Ellie's vocabulary is growing fast enough that the development referred to in the title is already a month or so out of date. Ellie mastered "no" pretty early on, first as a head shake, then as a vocal expression. Lisa also taught her to answer "yeah" to the (frequently asked) question: "Are you bad to the bone?" But for a long time, that was the only context in which she ever considered using the Y word. Then, about a month ago, she suddenly started to answer "yeah" to some of questions, and now her "no" answers are informative rather than just her stock response. In particular, we can now ask "do you want X?" questions and find out whether she does, in fact, want X. This feels like an incredible breakthrough in communication --- it's not much of a conversation, but it has two sides.
I originally aimed to write this update a couple of months ago, at which point we estimated the size of Ellie's vocabulary at around 50 words. By now I would guess it's up to 200 or so, and we get a couple of new ones each day. The major categories are what you might guess:
Body Parts: Head, nose, eyes, ears, mouth, teeth, tongue, cheeks, neck, shoulders, elbows, knees, toes. She understands feet, belly, and belly button, but doesn't say them (except for an occasional attempt at "button.")
Animals: Turtle, dog (though she has not perfected this to the extent we might have expected by now), cat, horses, whale (an early favorite; she also insists on calling dolphins whales, maybe just because we keep trying to correct her), duckie, goose, chicken, hippo ("happo," in Ellie's rendition), and a variable word that we understand as "jaguar" because it refers to a wooden jaguar mask that hangs on the wall of our dining room. She knows that cows say "moo," sheep say "baa," snakes say "ssss," lions say "aaarh," and roosters say something like "doot-doo." The two animal names that we most like getting her to say are lizard, which emerges as something like "thyther," and butterfly, which she considers hopeless but nonetheless spits out something like "thuhthehthuh" (the tongue position is much like that for blowing a raspberry).
Clothes: Hat (one of her earliest words, and still one of her favorites), shoe (also a favorite word at one point), boots, sock, pants, coat, hood (pronounced, like shoe, with a beautiful long "oooo"), and occasionally shirt. She will sometimes remark on zippers and buttons, too.
Favorite adjectives: Hot, cold (which used to be accompanied, at least much of the time, with a beautiful gritted-teeth shake of the head and shaking clenched fists), wet, purple.
Favorite book and video characters: Elmo (her favorite), Big Bird, Cookie (for Cookie Monster), Maisy, Thomas (as in Thomas the Tank Engine), and an assortment of Teletubbies: Po, Laa Laa, Dipsy, and the ever popular vacuum cleaner noo-noo.
Popular Foods: noo-noos (noodles), beans, pretzel, chicken, bagel, juice (again with the long oooo), milk ("mulk"), cheerios, cracker, boo-boo (her term for "Pirate Booty," a kind of organic Cheeto that she will consume in giant handfuls if allowed).
Exclamations: Uh oh (perhaps the favorite word of all just now), oops, oh NO!
As is natural for a child starting to name the world, Ellie began her vocabulary mainly with nouns, and it is only now that the verbs are beginning to catch up. "Sit" was one of the earliest, along with "shouw" --- Ellie's word for shoulders, which you may think of as a noun but she thinks of as a command to put her on your shoulders. By now the list has expanded to include walk, push, eat, close, down (which Ellie also uses in its prepositional sense, but often uses in place of the word "stop," e.g., when we are combing her hair or otherwise getting in the way of her happiness), hop (something that Ellie does very well, and often -- we see a trampoline in our future), kick (as in swimming), splash, pat (dog or knees), and help. The last is only a few days old, and it's another of those amazingly useful words. Ellie uses verbs either as imperatives ("sit" is often accompanied by a patting hand to show you *where* to sit) or as narratives, telling you what she is doing, or about to do, or thinking of doing.
While I have stuck mostly with conventional spelling, I have to admit that many of Ellie's words are still in a stage where they can be interpreted only by a small group of initiates --- parents, day care workers, and a few close friends. However, we are past what I thought of as the "consonants and context" phase, when context and a single dominant consonant were often the only clues to meaning (though "no" is pretty easy no matter what). Now we can usually expect the right number of syllables, several of the consonants, and some approximation to the vowels, which is usually enough for us to figure out what she is talking about. However, we have noticed a phenomenon that as her vocabulary grows, some words morph to sound more like each other, rather than more distinct. Thus, we have several groups of words that can at times sound almost identical and have to be distinguished by context. The largest of these groups is "Elmo, elbow, apples, animals, mama" (how can mama sound like animals, you ask, but I assure you that it can). And the distinction between Daddy, duckie, and doggie is not all that a proud father might hope for.
Ellie is becoming steadily more interested in books, and while she is sometimes on to the next book by the time the first one is halfway through, she is much more likely than she used to be to stick with a book to the end. She is especially fond of lift-the-flap books, and she picks up a number of her words from these. Another of her favorite books is "Blue Hat, Green Hat" in which we get animals wearing various colors of hats, shirts, pants, socks, shoes, etc. She likes this book mainly because of the turkey, who is always wearing his shirt on his legs, shoe on his head, etc., making the narrative rhythym "blue hat, green hat, yellow hat, OOOPS." A couple of weeks ago, this led to what we have decided is Ellie's first literary allusion: as Lisa was about to put on Ellie's shirt, she leaned to one side, stuck out her leg, and said "OOOPS." It took us a moment to get the joke, but now we go through the shirt-on-the-leg-oops routine almost every morning (and have recently branched out to pants-on-the-head).
Ellie still uses words one at a time, and she has yet to say anything that could qualify as a sentence. However, another development of the last few weeks has been her first "stories." Ellie is a big fan of "A Grand Day Out," the claymation movie in which Wallace and his dog Gromit build a rocket and go to the moon for cheese. She likes to imitate Wallace's "cheese" exclamation, in which he clenches his fists, raises them to his shoulders, and shakes them slightly in excitement. At one point, we were playing in Ellie's room, and I picked up Ellie's plastic Eiffel tower, thrust it upward with a "whooosh" sound, and said "rocket," and maybe, "to the moon." Ellie responded "cheese." Now she will frequently pick up the Eiffel tower and tell the whole story herself: "whooosh ... moon .... cheese."
A more recent story dates from a visit to our friends Kathy and Frank and their dog Marco, two weeks ago. We worked on "Kathy" and "Frank" before we left, and Ellie managed a recognizable rendition of each. Then the next day she said "Kathy ... Frank ... Marco ... patting," and she has been repeating the tale of this adventure ever since. Another recent addition to her story repertoire is "horses ... sit ... up-down," a reference to the merry-go-round at the zoo, relived as she looks at a merry-go-round in one of her lift-the-flap books. As "patting" indicates, Ellie's language is beginning to show signs of interesting syntax, including this gerund, some inconsistent but nonetheless detectable use of s-endings for plurals and possessives, and perhaps a recognition of the distinction between he and she. I may be giving her to much credit on the last of these, since the only context in which she uses these pronouns is when one of us says (in response to Ellie hiding something behind her back, or herself behind a chair) "where is he?" or "where is she?" and Ellie repeats "ishe?" or "isshe?" As you can tell from the spelling, the difference between "ishe?" and "isshe?" is a subtle one, and may be just copied from our sounds anyway, but I still think I detect the first signs of gender.
In sum, listening to Ellie talk is getting to be lots of fun, and her understanding of us is good enough and her vocabulary of response large enough that it feels like real, if halting, communication. There is lots of other stuff to report from the last six months: Ellie disliked day care at first but likes it now; after three months of one cold after another she has either been lucky in the last three months or developed immunity to every bug her classmates have to throw at her; she loves her weekly swimming lesson (which consists of being carried around the pool by Daddy, kicking, splashing, chasing rubber ducks, floating with rubber noodles, jumping into the pool, and so forth) and loves everything to do with water in all its guises (puddles, ice cubes, snowballs, steam emerging from her humidifier, etc.; she has even been known to fake a fall in daycare just so she can request ice for her "injuries"); she runs fast and is becoming a proficient and enthusiastic climber (yikes); and she is just generally a very happy kid. But in the interests of actually getting this update done in time to get *some* sleep tonight, I will leave it at that.