At last: "BUH!"
It appears Edith is going to be a reader after all. After nearly fourteen months of rejecting books out of hand, then manhandling them on her own but throwing them down and running away if anyone else tried to get involved, she has figured out that there are pictures on the pages. She also seems to have reversed her isolationist position and decided that it's actually interesting to invite Mom and Dad to participate now and then. For one thing, they say and do interesting things while they turn the pages.
For the last week or so, Edith has started bringing us books and waiting expectantly. The first few times I thought it might have been a fluke, but when she continued to do it several times a day and then added the syllable "Buh", I decided she may really be serious about this new hobby.
There are limits to her bibliophilia. She doesn't want to be held while reading. She wants to stand next to you, so she can make a quick getaway when things get boring. And they do tend to get boring before the end of a story. But who am I to judge? I don't finish my books in one sitting either.
She has definite favorites: (1) The first two pages of Goodnight, Moon. (2) The first page of a Scottish nursery rhyme book her Mor-mor and Mor-far gave her, because it features a rhyme in which you touch each part of the child's face and end by tickling her under the chin. When we finish this rhyme she usually grabs one of our fingers and puts it back on her eyebrow, indicating we should start over. Or she jumps to the end and tickles herself under the chin.
But the book she likes the most, the one she brings us most often and enjoys at least half of at a time, is Go, Dogs, Go. For those who don't know it, we call it the fake Dr. Seuss book. It looks like Dr. Seuss and looks like it should sound like Dr. Seuss, but it's not nearly so clever. It somewhat inexplicably features a bunch of dogs jumping out of bed and racing by every available means of transportation to...a dog party at the top of a tree(?). I think Edith likes it because we read it in an excited voice, almost shouting, to indicate urgency. These protagonists are on the move. Clearly, Edith can identify.
Tonight for the first time she said "Buh" as I carried her into her room for bed. I asked her which one she wanted to read, putting her down in front of the basket of books by the rocking chair so she could pick one. Before even laying eyes on it, however, Edith responded, "Go-dah-go!" I didn't know she remembered any of her books without a visual prompt.
When we'd finished reading it through twice, she turned to one of the pages featuring the same text as the title and repeated "Go-dah-go!" over and over. She really likes that turn in the plot.
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Since last Friday's post Edith has added not only book but also hat and a much more consistent more to her spoken vocabulary and shoe, bath, music, sleep, please, and thank-you to her signing vocabulary. And the wheels on the bus are going wow an wow an wow. It's like you can see the neural grooves forming. Exciting times.
2 comments:
We liked Go Dog Go too. I'm pretty sure there is at least one old photo of me as a toddler, carrying that book. In terms of reading over and over and over, the one that flummoxed my dad the most was Fox in Socks. He just could not get his tongue around things like "Chicks with bricks and blocks and clocks come." Your call whether you want to put yourself through the torture by introducing that one. :)
As far as Edith's ever-increasing vocabulary goes, it just sounds amazing to watch. I was curious whether she is inventing any words. I had some words when I was about that age that had no correspondence to the actual English word I meant. For instance, "Dee!" meant "Again!" No idea where these come from, but just wondered if you'd noticed anything like that.
Huh, interesting idea--that of inventing words. I hadn't thought of it quite like that, but Edith does have consistent syllables used in specific contexts that seem to bear no relation to the word an adult English speaker would use in the same context. "Na" or "nana" in place of "water," for example. She also tends to use a generic ASL sign, somewhere between "tree" and "bye-bye," when she wants to communicate something for which she doesn't have a sign.
It's interesting to me exactly how words get morphed into babyspeak. Most often her version of a word consists of its first morpheme. (She'd thrive in the Dominican Republic...) Occasionally she uses the end of the word instead: "eat" is an exploded "t," and her dog's name is "mar[ck]." Than there seems to be some re-ordering of sounds or maybe eliding of sounds going on, as in the name of her good friend Harrison, who has become "Hen-na" (the n held at length and the other vowel sounds almost not there, as in Japanese).
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