With arms outstretched...

Compartment 14B

Newest Older Contact Me Profile Photos Etsy

Baby talk.

2006-11-17 - 10:16 a.m.

I was just reading one of Linda�s blogs, Purple is a Fruit, and her last point �Dogs are now doggies, fish are fishies, and giant disgusting swaths of human feces are poopies.� struck a note with me.

I have endeavoured, mostly with success, to avoid the �y� and �ies� at the end of words when talking to Grommet. I made a conscious decision that, in her world, a dog will be a dog and not doggy, and a cat will be a cat and not kitty. �Poop� is a mild enough word to my ears that I don�t bring it down further by adding a �y� on the end. When my father in-law asks Grommet if she�s playing with a froggy, I gently correct him with �frog�.

This has made me wonder though, if I�m doing her a disservice in that she won�t be able to recognize that the two versions of these names do, in fact, refer to the same animal. To this end, I have softened my stance on certain words. A rabbit is a �bunny rabbit� so that she learns both names and I do the same with �kitty cat.� A duck may be a duck when I�m pointing to it swimming in the canal, but a rubber duck can indeed be a rubber ducky in this house. Of course, the latter is partly due to the fact that I like to sing Ernie�s Rubber ducky, you�re the one song to her in the bath.

In this vein of thinking, I do wonder another thing: am I wrong to have no children�s music to play for Grommet? Is the radio and Paul Simon�s Graceland enough? You see, I don�t usually have anything on as background music. I listen to the radio for a short while in the morning for a few songs that bracket the 5 minutes of news and weather (plus a local 5-minute trivia contest because, as a friend pointed out the other day, I am a trivia whore), but other than that it�s pretty much silent all the time here. I just prefer the quiet and find it calming. BUT with a baby around I do wonder if I�m not providing enough stimulation for her (particularly auditory, but other types too), hence the trips to drop-in groups a few times a week and the attempts to get out of the house with her for at least a short while every day.

This parenting stuff is not entirely what I expected. To be honest, some of it�s not as hard as I thought it would be, but concerns come from unexpected quarters as well.

Before - After


All content � Shawna 2003-2010
That means no swiping my stuff - text, images, etc. - without asking.

P.S. If you're emailing me, replace the [at] with @ in the "to" line. Oh, and if you put the word "journal" in the subject line it'll have a better chance of making it past my junk mail filters.

recommend me
HTML and design help by Jo
hosted by Diaryland