Linguistic Development of my Toddler

I've decided (or rather, I've accepted the fact that I was doing this all along) to document via lj the linguistic development of my (admittedly brilliant) toddler. The first reason for this is that I'm too much a mom to resist bragging about my little miracle. The second is my professional interest in language acquisition, especially bilingual acquisition. How children develop their first language is fairly well-documented. How they develop when they're learning two languages as mother tongues is much less so, and it's truly a fascinating process.

This morning Elizabeth finally started using whole sentences in French. She was holding a cup and filling and emptying it with her bathwater; I was repeating, "plein, vide," our usual word-game for that activity. She looked at me and said, "je vide! Mommy, je vide!" I'm not sure I've ever heard her use a pronoun in French before; I know she understood them, but I hadn't heard them. A few minutes later, I was combing her hair with a purple comb. She took it out of my hand, looked at it, and said, "Dat's purple, Mommy!" I agreed and told her, "Oui, le peigne est purple! Il est purple!" She repeated those two sentences exactly like that, and went on to point to her doll. "Jaune, mommy! Poupée est jaune!" I was flabbergasted. I'd never heard her use "est" (or "is", for that matter) outside of a contraction before; I'd heard "jaune" only once or twice; and I'd heard "poupée" maybe three times. A completely new utterance, with new words. Then she extended it: "Elle est jaune!" (I must admit that i'm not sure if she said "elle" or "il" for that sentence.)

We talked about her yellow dress, her white tights, her black shoes, mommy putting on makeup, mommy's pretty hair, and several other aspects of personal grooming, and the entire time I heard only three words in English - purple, pretty, and bathroom. In the last few weeks, her use of French has easily doubled, maybe tripled.

She just touched my face and said, "je maquille, Mommy?" (I can't remember how to spell that word offhand.) I told her no, babies don't wear makeup, so she said, "Mommy maquille pretty."

She's such a darling.

New Icons

I've actually played around with my pictures for the first time in months!

More accurately, I had Piet play around with them while I watched and commented.

Anyhow, there's this one, and there's another you'll see once in a while that is very similar, and there's one for any writing activity that jinzi and sassy_fae, in particular, will like. :)

blech.

Headache.

Tight muscles.

Canker sore.

Trivial, all of it. Yet it has me just generally feeling blech.

I'm going to dig up some Oragel and go to bed.