Ellie turned two about two weeks ago, so it seems like a good time for another update. However, I'll start with something I forgot to put in the last one. About the time she developed "yeah" --- maybe even before --- Ellie also figured out a version of OK. In her best approximation, this would emerge as "oh-TAY!", usually with an excited emphasis on the last syllable in imitation of the way we usually say it to her. However, this word was one with a lot of variation, and it often came out more like "ah-TEE!" or, almost as often, "hot-TEA!". This, of course, was irresistible, so we started saying "hot-TEA!" ourselves, and the real confusion began when we started pointing to our cups of tea and saying "look, hot TEA!" So now Ellie generally refers to any steaming mug as "hot TEA!" (though I have stymied her again by pointing out that my mug usually contains hot COFFEE), and her OK has morphed back towards oh-TAY and is usually distinguishable.
Happy B (really happy buh) is, of course, Ellie's rendition of happy birthday. She was somewhat familiar with the idea from day care, where the tradition is to bring in cupcakes when someone in the class turns two, and she generally referred to it simply as "happy." But after a day of being told "Happy Birthday!" over and over again, she extended the term to "Happy Buh." And after a somewhat rocky start caused by too little sleep, she did indeed seem to have a genuinely good time. The weather cooperated for a backyard party in the evening with four of our friends' 1-2 year olds (and, of course, our friends and neighbors, to give the adults a fighting chance), and the shower of presents gave many new things to keep them enertained. A second party over the weekend gave the adults more chance to have fun, and Ellie diverted herself with additional presents and getting as much of her body as she could into the Melville's fish pond without actually jumping in. Ellie may not know what a birthday is, but she is getting the present thing down. Now if she would only get better at writing those thank you notes.
Hot tea and happy buh are two examples of one of the recent trends in Ellie's language, two (or occasionally three) word phrases. Some other examples are "our car," "up-down" (in reference to merry-go-rounds), "high five," "sit down," perennial favorites "all gone" and "all done," "come ON" (in which I recognize with embarrassment the echo of my own, usually exasperated intonation of this phrase), and "one-two" (about which I'll have more to say later). For the last couple of days, "come on guys" and "how'y'oo?" have been favorite phrases. Ellie has been pretty good at "thank you" ("tay-tooo") for some time now; she uses it spontaneously at most of the right times, and she has recently extended the phrase to "tay-too MUCH." She'll also say "pease," but only when prompted.
As these examples illustrate, Ellie's two-word combinations are really stock phrases, essentially just two words treated as one, but I think they are also an intermediary on the way to sentences, where free combinations allow a finite number of words to say an infinite number of things. We have seen just a few examples of such invented combinations, such as "Daddy sit down" and (during my most recent out-of-town trip) "Daddy all gone." The most amusing example came last week. Since Ellie often wakes us up in the middle of the night, we are in the habit of putting bathrobes out in convenient places. These are fluffy white numbers with a goose emblazoned on the front (it's actually a swan, but once Ellie started to call it a goose we decided that was good enough). The other day, when I took the bathrobe back to the bathroom in the morning she said "goose ... back." Sentences, here we come.
Since Ellie now says hundreds of words and picks up new ones every day, the interesting linguistic developments mostly have to do with grammar, both the successes and the mistakes. It is only in the last few weeks that she has started to refer to herself, initially when she would look at photographs and point out "Ellie," then in answer to us pointing at her chest and saying "who's that?" Now she says "Ellie" all the time, though l's are not her strong suit, and it often emerges more like "I-I." We can't decide whether this is simply a matter of pronunciation, or whether she is trying to figure out first-person/third-person and compromising on something that might serve for both. In any event, pronouns are clearly tough. On Saturdays, we often take Ellie to storytime at the Columbus central library, and a highlight of this event is always the stickers that are handed out at the end. At the St. Patrick's day story, these stickers were being given first to kids wearing green, and Ellie (dressed by culturally oblivious parents) grew increasingly impatient as she was passed over. Finally, she pointed desperately to herself and cried out "you, you, you!" This mistake occurs pretty often and always amuses us, but our patient explanations that "when we refer to you we say 'you,' but when you refer to yourself, you should say 'me'" don't seem to solve the problem. If only she knew what "refer" means. For the most part, Ellie circumvents the pronoun problem by just saying "Ellie."
Ellie has now mastered possessives -- most often "Ellie's," but also "Mama's", "Daddy's", "Anna's", and so on. Because of the pronoun thing, we haven't yet faced the incessant cries of "mine" that we know are coming. She tried out "mime" a few days ago, but it doesn't seem to have stuck. We have always been somewhat annoyed by the Sesame Street character Elmo, including the fact that he always says "Elmo" and "Elmo's" instead of "I," "me," or "mine," but we now have to admit that this habit is true to his character as a preschool-aged monster. Ellie has also figured out that she should use s's for plurals, and she is starting on her irregular nouns with "feet" and "people." While Ellie's verbs usually appear in simple form, she has always said "touching" instead of "touch," probably because she learned the word from us saying (over and over again) "no touching." Thus, "touching" is usually a request, accompanied by urgent jabs of her finger that direct us to her desire. Just recently, she has begun to make regular use of other gerunds, like walking, raining, and running, and she seems to have figured out the idea that -ing transforms a verb into a half-adjective that describes ongoing action. While we know that all two-year-olds learn these things, and that we must have done so ourselves in those long-lost days when we were linguistic geniuses, it still seems like a miracle if we stop to think about it.
Ellie is also developing her mathematical skills --- specifically, she can now count to two. She has been fascinated by the word "two/too" for quite some time. Often, when one of us would say it when talking to the other, Ellie, who had otherwise seemed to be paying no attention, would repeat "tooo ..." in a tone both dreamy and mildly puzzled. I think she is picking up on the way that "too" has a meaning similar to but clearly distinct from "two," so that to her it seems like this is one word she can't quite get a fix on. (She doesn't pick up on "to" in this way, presumably because we don't really pronounce it the same.) But a couple of weeks ago, she decided that she had figured out the numerical version, and now she will often say "one-two" (never just two) when she has a pretzel in each hand or a pair of balls, and she says it any time we drive into the garage when the other car is already there. We've had a few tries at getting her to say "one, two, three," but for now she seems to think that two is the largest number one could need. After that, many.
Over spring break, we went to Moab, Utah (near Arches National Park), meeting up with friends from Germany with whom we have gone hiking many times in years past. We weren't sure how this would go, but Ellie turned out to be an enthusiastic hiker. When we actually wanted to cover any ground, she traveled in a baby backpack, and she enjoyed taking in the fresh air and scenery. She was even happier when we found a sufficiently precipice-free spot that we could stop and let her explore for herself (still with one of us trailing three feet behind). Much of the landscape near Moab is slick rock, which, untrue to its name, is quite easy to walk on with hiking boots. At 22 months, Ellie proved a remarkably adept rock climber, charging straight up steeply angled slopes and finding handholds and footholds where she needed them. We regarded this previously undiscovered skill with a mixture of admiration and alarm. On the whole it was a great trip, and we are delighted to find how much Ellie likes the great outdoors. Hiking is a part of our lives we would like to keep going, even if we can't manage the mileage we did in times past.
Now that the weather has warmed up, Ellie also gets to spend more time outdoors back home, and that has improved life for all of us. She now runs faster than we can walk, climbs nerve-wrackingly tricky pieces of playground equipment, and has recently discovered the fun of jumping from the bench on our back deck. She remains as water-manic as ever, delighting in her weekly swim class, her new caterpillar lawn sprinkler, baths, running faucets, and puddles of any shape, size, or depth. We have learned to live with her jumping, kneeling, even bending over to dip her hair in our backyard puddles, but we still try to draw the line at drinking from them (which she would happily do if we would let her).
Ellie has had a strong will for as long as we have known her. (And evidently for longer than that. We still remember the development profile we received just after the referral notice --- "shows signs of refusal ... check, sometimes obstinate ... check.") As her communication improves, she is showing signs of a similar "commanding" (or perhaps more accurately, imperious) streak. A couple of months ago she discovered that her parents would play "follow the leader" if she clapped her hands, patted her knees, grabbed her feet, and so forth. This is now one of her favorite games --- she directs us to "sit down," then launches into a series of actions for us to imitate, many of them quite inventive, and some of them beyond the abilities of her aged parents. She has developed a pretty good somersault, but if she does one she immediately points to one of us and insists that we do one too. This morning, while she was swinging at the playground, she decided that the two of us should be riding the spring-mounted motorcycles across from her, and she wouldn't take no for an answer. We're told that at day care she is particularly good at starting something mischievous (a raid on the cracker supply, say), getting other kids to follow along, then slipping away to an innocent distance as soon as the teacher arrives. These personality traits seem to augur many possible career paths --- politics, perhaps, or maybe the management of a successful corporation like Enron.
Like last summer, we will be going to Paris for the second half of June and all of July. This should be lots of fun, though we are hoping that the apartment that seemed an ideal size for a 14-month old just learning how to walk won't seem very small with a 24-month old who can run from one end to the other in four seconds, and that we can make it through the summer without Ellie scaling the wall of the Luxembourg Gardens fountain for an up-close-and-personal visit with the ducks.
Ellie continues to delight and charm us most of the time, but we are also learning why the twos have their reputation as a challenging age. We used to take crying as an indication that she was genuinely upset about something we should try hard to fix. It is hard to adjust to the screams and sobs that now often accompany trivial denials of her immediate desires, to go outside, to come in, to be picked up, to be put down, etc. We know, in principle, that two-year-olds test boundaries as a fact of life, but it's still hard not to get frustrated when "please don't X" is instantly followed by X, and Y, and Z. Ellie has become proficient at saying "sorry" when she is asked to do so, but as one of our friends recently told us (quoting a parenting book, I think): "You can teach a two-year old to say sorry, but you cannot teach her to mean it."