Toddler Tracks: Vocabularrific

This kid says so many things that make us laugh, on a daily basis, that we can’t possibly keep track of them all. Some are only funny because we’re his parents and we dig everything he does. (Like, for example, a few minutes ago he called out from his bed, where he’s been procrastinating about going to sleep, “My button fell off.” He is wearing zero buttons. He’s trying to get us to come in there, the little sneakster, but we cracked up anyway.)

Lately, his words are getting ridiculous. This is mostly because I have lots of family members who like to experiment on my son, teaching him advanced polysyllabic words just to hear him say them. And sometimes he just likes unusual words and latches onto them… which is something I can relate to.

• Daddy taught him to tap his chest and say “Pectorals.” One morning, it was the first word out of his mouth upon awakening.
• Not exactly vocabulary, but since it made me laugh: another morning, the first words out of his mouth were “Oz, Willow, Giles, Xander.” (Please don’t judge: he’s only seen a total of about 5 minutes of one episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but he really likes to look at the pictures on the DVD case.)
• He has a set of books from two of his great-aunts featuring West Coast Native art. He likes them a lot, and we get a kick out of hearing him say with enthusiasm words like “salmon”, “ravens”, “totem”, “peace”, and “unity”.
• He also has a book called “How Things Go”, which is way above his comprehension level but has lots of flaps and moving bits so he loves it. He has learned words like “cockpit”, “container ship”, “stabilizers”, and “jet engines”. And he knows who’s in the black-and-white portrait on the page about forces: “Newton.” In fact, just this morning, he spontaneously christened his stuffed moose Newton. (His second toy with a real name!)
• He is an expert on trapezoids. (He’s got a shape puzzle at his grandparents’ house, and he’d already figured out square, circle, rectangle, triangle, and – sometimes – octagon… so trapezoid has to follow, right?) He identifies them everywhere, in things I’ve never noticed contain trapezoids, like lampshades and our square bowls and baskets. It knocks me out every time.
• He’s learned, again from his Daddy, to say an ironic “Wah wah wahhh” punchline at the end of certain books (namely, the “If You Give A Mouse” books). It’s pretty funny – especially when he forgets to wait until the end of the book.
• On the topic of those moments that make me almost fall over with pride… he’s got a great ear. The other day we were at the bank and heard a distant siren. He immediately looked at me (with his current favourite dramatic face on, the one with big eyes, tiny “o” mouth, chin down) and said “Ambulance.”
• [That was a funny trip out – I tried to make the bank sound like a fun errand so he would want to go, and he took my encouragement too much to heart. All the way there, he was saying “Bank, woo-hoo!” and then he recognized where we were, based on the parking lot (?!), and was all excited to hear the beeping of the ATM. The bank wasn’t even open. Then I taught him to push the door-opener button, and he loved that. He was quite sad to leave. He kept turning around and going back inside until I finally had to scoop him up.]
• Also, on the mornings he goes to the babysitter’s, sometimes we listen to a classical music station in the car. Sometimes I’ll tell him, “Ooh, that’s the sound of a trumpet,” or “There’s the flute,” or “Those are violins.” Then one morning Bob Mackowycz of CBC2 played “Bittersweet Symphony” by The Verve, with its infamous violin riff intro, and my brilliant little son said, “Violins!”
• On a more random note: he’s become obsessed with drawing. He wants his crayons all the time. Sometimes he wants us to draw things. Right now, he usually wants us to draw either an E, or a 2, or a cow. Which is too bad because my cow drawings are awful.
• I have been enjoying his transference of concepts. I got a great kick out of the blasphemous moment when he was fiddling with his Batman action figure’s cape, and said, “Apron.” But the absolute best was when he found my bamboo cracker tray, put it on the floor, stood on it, and said, “Surfin’.” I admit to being slightly embarrassed because he’s obviously already seen Surf’s Up too many times in the short period he’s been fixated on animated movies… but it was SO apt. Just like Cody Maverick’s!

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