Emma-isms

Oh man — toddlers are adorable and hilarious, and now that I live with one, I feel the need to document some of the stuff she says and does because I know this phase will end and I won’t remember the little things…

…like how Emma fell asleep for her nap on Sunday with a book smack on top of her face. We almost always read a book before nap, and then I put a few in the crib with her to look at while winding down. She must have been really engrossed in Moo Baa La La La! Or else she found it so dull it put her right to sleep!

She has enough words now that I’ve lost count, but most of them are completely unintelligible to anyone who doesn’t spend hours with her every day. The word “fish,” for instance, sounds like “bih” or even “bee.” No, neither of those in any ways resembles what the word “fish” actually sounds like, but trust me, that’s what she is saying.

She has this deck of Old Maid cards that Jose got her for Christmas and its her favorite toy at the moment by far — she loves looking at the characters on each one. One is a man dressed in black graduation robes, which she calls “dada.” Another is a female gardener in a hat digging in the dirt, which she calls “mama.” Whenever she comes across either of those, she makes sure to point it out to us. And whenever she spots the deck of cards in the first place, she picks them up and brings them to us to open for her (the box is tricky) while letting loose a chorus of “oh may! oh may! oh may!”

She likes putting on her shoes, or bringing mine or Jose’s to us. On Sunday it dawned on me that she now understands more complex, multi-part commands — we were back in my bedroom and I asked her to go to her room and get her shoes. She ran across the house to her room and returned a moment later, shoes in hand.

One of her favorite books right now is Go Dog Go, which is pronounced in Emma-speak as “go ga go.”

She can identify many animals, including cats, but her word for cat is “meow” which for her sounds like “mao.”

She’s working on colors, although at this point the only one she can reliably identify is yellow. To her credit, her version of yellow is quite close, usually sounding like a cross between “yellow” and “lellow.” She tries to call every other color yellow too, although if you say the word, she will repeat it — green is “reen,” blue is “loo,” and red is “reh.”

We have these foam letters in the bathtub. If you show her the “M” or the “D” she says “mama” and “dada” respectively. If you ask her to find the E for Emma, she gets it right every time. My mom says I knew the alphabet by the time I was 2, so we joke that we’ve got 5 more months to teach it to Emma.

One of the bases for the infant car seat was still in the back of our Highlander even though we moved up to our convertible car seat 6+ months ago. I brought it into the house finally on Saturday, and Emma immediately sat down in it as if it were a chair.

When she heard the ice cream truck going down the street on two different occasions last weekend, she responded with her latest dance move — pumping her arms up and down as if she is running in place.

Each morning when we walk into Emma’s classroom at daycare, a handful of the other kids come up to give her a hug. One in particular — her little friend Alexa — gets visibly and audibly excited to see Emma walk in and has been known to give as many as FOUR welcoming hugs. Emma returns the hugs too.

Toddlers are awesome.