A Vocabulary Lesson

Our daughter has always been chatty, and seriously has a better grasp of the English language than about fifty percent of the adults that I know. She asks us what things are called and what words mean. We offer explanations and watch the little wheels turn in her head.  She surprises us with what she remembers and her ability to use words in the appropriate context. One Saturday we went out to lunch and ran into her friend from daycare. The girls ran to each other and jumped around and hugged. On the way home our two year old informed us, “I saw Avery at Qdoba and we embraced!”  My husband and I looked at each other, smiled, and shook our heads in disbelief.

Around last Halloween, she started to really get into the princess thing. She was two years and a few months old.  We read Cinderella as her bedtime story for at least nine nights in a row.  She was (and still is) under the Disney princess spell. At that time, my husband did all of the reading at night because I had my hands full nursing my three month old at bedtime. He is a champ when it comes to reading to our kids. He points to each word, acknowledges the author and illustrator, and makes sure to talk about what is going on in the illustrations of the book. There is a picture in her book of Cinderella entering the ball, and in that picture, there is a chandelier. She asked what it was. My husband explained that a fancy light hanging from the ceiling is called a chandelier.  She locked that information away and started calling any hanging light a chandelier.

Halloween night arrived.  I got her dressed in her ducky costume and she was so excited to head out the door. My husband got the video camera out and started recording. It was getting dark, so he turned on the entryway light. I started asking a bunch of questions.

Me: “What day is it? What are you dressed up like?”

Her: “Halloween!! I’m a duck!!”

Me: “What are we going to do?”

Her: “Trick or treat!”

Her: pointing up to the glass light fixture hanging in the entryway: "What's that Daddy?"

He replies: "You know what that is, what is that?"

She says proudly: "A VAGINA!"

Weeeeell, maybe she doesn’t use her words correctly all of the time. The best part, of course, is that we have the whole exchange immortalized forever on video.