Little Lady Words

Words matter. You know? They really do. We are relational beings, yearning for communication, fellowship, and belonging.

But just like anything else, we have to learn how to use words.

My daughter celebrated her second birthday a several months ago. It’s an incredible (and incredibly trying) age. Husband and I are loving (almost) every minute of it. Every day brings something unique, and Little Lady soaks it up like the distressed tomato plant out back that I keep forgetting to water.

Husband and I have found it both a challenge and a joy to transition with her into more and more verbal communication. She is ridiculous intelligent (she gets that from her father), and she truly enjoys sharing with us everything she is learning and perceiving in the world around her.

One of her excellent vocabularic groups is numbers. She has yet to say “seven,” but she has zero through six, and has sometimes given us a “nine.” She clearly recognizes the written numbers and the numeric values; she just hasn’t spoken some of those words yet (this was true at the time I wrote this piece – she’s actually pushing forty now). She loves to count. She loves to speak numbers*.

And letters. Little Lady loves her letters (she gets that from her momma). She has a foam-letter alphabet in which she finds delight each day, though the letters never change. The ones that are missing are missing – she knows and loves them just the same; the ones that are accounted for make her squeal and giggle as every Little Lady ought.

Another set of words she knows and uses well are animal sounds and motions. A horse is a “baby neigh.” A dog is a “baby woof woof.” A frog and bunny are both “baby hop hop.” You get the picture. She has a few oddball ones: A squirrel is something like a “currrrrrrrrrrrrrrrh” (a half snore-half growl sound) and an insect is a “baby rah” (because “the ants go marching two by two, hoo-RAH, hoo-RAH” – get it?).

She picked up saying “yum yum” from Super Simple Songs (if you don’t know, I’m sorry). My personal favorite is her “right alright” (no idea where that came from), and as she loves to be outdoors, one of her favorite things to say each day is “momma baby go go?”

She has some other words, but aside from momma, papa, and oomah (what she calls Grandma), these are the words which make up much of her conversation from day to day: Numbers and letters, animals, yum-yums, and go-gos.

From my heart to yours,