The boy of direct address

My mom recently read an article that discussed the development of language skills for toddlers. It seems the experts say that by age three, kids should be speaking in complete sentences. That seemed a bit late to me, but I guess I’ve become accustomed to the chatterboxes that live at our house.

While Cooper is off and running, surprising me every day with words he has somehow added to his vocabulary like “actually” and “asphalt”, Brisco is still trying to master the ins and outs of the English language. However, I’d say it is certain that he’s off to a roaring start. So much so, that I’ve started referring to him as “The boy of direct address”.

With both boys learning and developing their language daily, I am always attempting to decode their dialogue. My instinct is to repeat whatever has been said to make sure I’m on the right track. I suppose my repetition, and my overuse of their names, has given Brisco the pattern by which to follow. He has certainly caught on to my technique.

He’s always very polite, throwing in a “Thank you” or a “Thanks” where appropriate. But what is so striking is his relentless technique of putting the person’s name at the end. “Where are you going, Mommy?” “Can I go wish you, Mommy?” “I need wobby-dobble, Mommy.” “Can I flush it, Mommy?” And on and on and on.

To me, this stage of language development is the most fun. His words have such a sing-song style; they’re slow and melodious and drawn out. Randy has decided he sounds like Thumper from Bambi. I think he’s right. Of course I can decipher most of what says, but Dad has a little more trouble. Even the smallest of errors can sometimes be confusing, but I know when he says, with a look of frustration, “I don’t did it!” that what he really means is “I can’t do it.”

And when I hear, “It’s gopen, Mommy.” I know that something isn’t working and needs my attention. Just the other day, we were coloring at the table. Brisco picked up the white crayon and attempted to use it. He stopped, looked at it intently, and said with a furrowed brow, “Crayon’s gopen, Mommy.” In all my years of coloring, I’d never considered that the white crayon was broken.

I know he listens to me because he is always repeating something I’ve said to him. It just isn’t always in close proximity to when I first said it, which makes interpretation a little more difficult.

One afternoon, I put him in the high chair with a snack while I unloaded groceries and put things away. As I was doing so, I dropped a glass bottle of salad oil out of the fridge and onto the tile floor. It burst into a million pieces. As I crawled around the kitchen on my hands and knees trying to clean up the shards of glass, I could hear Brisco saying something in the background. I guess I was too frustrated to really listen closely because I couldn’t make out what he was repeating…over and over and over.

After about five minutes of hearing the same, unintelligible phrase, I looked up at him from where I was crouching beneath the bar and said, “Brisco! What are you saying?!” He just looked at me, smiled, cocked his head to the side, and said, “Mommmmmyyy, doe bump ‘ee head.”

Traveling down the highway with kids in the car presents another interesting opportunity for conversation, but it’s usually the most fun when it’s just the little guy and me-probably because he has a chance to get a word in without Cooper. And he does his best to make the most of it. He’ll talk from the time we shut the doors until I unstrap him from his “snip snap”.

One of his favorite questions always concerns the route by which we will be traveling. It never fails; once the car is running it seems he can’t wait to ask, at least a dozen times, “Offy inatate, Mommy?”

Like his brother, Brisco is all boy. He loves semis and tractors and work trucks, and he knows them all by name. Well, he knows the names that his books give to them. Like the transporter truck named Bony Tony, and the tanker truck named Tina. He’ll ride in the car for hours just hoping for a glimpse of someone familiar. And when he sees them, he’ll shout at the top of his lungs, “Bone-ty Tone-ty, Mommy!” or “Nina! Nina, Mommy!”

There are certainly a lot of milestones we haven’t reached, but I do believe that if the language experts visited our house, they would be pleased. And although having my name attached to every sentence can be overwhelming and annoying to say the least, I know there will come a day when I’ll no longer be “Mommy”, but simply “Mom” or “Mama” or “Mother”. Of course there’s nothing at all wrong with being addressed by any these, but I’ve got to admit, there’s just something about “Mommy” that makes life sweet.

And that’s All in a day’s work!