Fun at One

A (my baby) has started stringing 2-3 words together to make sentences. I thought I will capture all the baby talk and her funny ways to communicate before it turns into little toddler sentences.

Let me start with my favorite, what is your name and she says Anana. If she wants something she pats her chest and says Anana.

She knows two numbers. How old are you and she shoots up her index finger. And if you ask how many of anything are there, she says t-ree, with her index and middle finger wrapped together.

She has given me a new name, mi-mi. Don’t know how this started, she just came up with it one day (maybe its something to do with B referring to me as mommy to her). She also calls me amma at times, but it is mostly mi-mi, and if she is trying real hard to convince me about something it is mi-mi-ma.

If she feels a lot of love for someone, and she wants to express it she adds her name to ours, like, mi-mi-nana (that is mi-mi + anana) or appa-nana.

She was gifted the same kind of teddy bear by two people, so my parents told her that they were twin teddies and named them Ina and Mina. She calls out to them all the time as Ina-Mina as though its one word.

Her first animal sound was inney for neigh. When it started all farm animals said inney and we listened to it all day when she pointed to a pig, a horse, a cow and everything. Now she has added meow-meow, bow-bow and moo to her vocab.

She now knows how to communicate so that she gets what she wants. Like when we are asking her to finish up her dinner while we are eating ours, and she wants to tell B that she rather eat what is on his plate she says, appa mamm mamm. If B looks up at her to say what about my food, she pats herself and says anana.

She calls all kids ‘baby’ irrespective of their age. She is the youngest at her day care home and calls all the other kids baby. A few days after she started her day care, I asked her what do all the babies tell you at the day care, she pulls her cheeks with her hand and says, baby,baby much to my amusement!

She loves to ask for kisses (abba in her language), she points to her cheeks and says mi-mi abba.

She loves to talk over the phone to her thatu, tapi (she cant say pati), amamma, thata and her aunt (whom she calls by name!) She does a lot of pretend talk with her toy phone, and paces the room when she is talking. (We realized that is how B and I talk over the phone!)

Who says you cannot play Dumb Charades at 14 months. We had just blown candles and cut a cake when celebrating an occasion recently, after which she loved licking the icing. I put the whole cake away from her sight and started feeding her a piece I had cut. It did not have any icing and she did not like it. She tried to tell us something, but could not find the cake to point to. So she enacted the whole scene of blowing the candles and licking the icing to tell us she what she wants.

She knows what a restaurant is and gets all excited when we tell her we are going to one. When in a Chinese restaurant once, she kept nodding to the waitress indicating she wants food, when she realized that she is not understanding, she took her cheerios cup and showed it to her and said cup tappathi anana. Anything edible and circular is tappathi (chappathi) in her language, until she heard me tell naan at an indian restaurant last night. Every time the waiter came to fill our water glasses she called out her newly learnt word naan.

If she finds a book or a newspaper she pretends to read it and says, Ae-Eee or Ae-B.

She can understand 3 languages, thanks to the fact that I speak to her in Kannada, B speaks to her in Tamil and she is spoken to in English at the day care. It is amazing how kids learn at this age; though people told us we are burdening her with 3 languages she seems to treat it like second nature. When she talks she mixes all the 3 like mimi ba(come in kannada), baby tutam(water in tamil).

She absolutely loves the songs of the movie jungle book, and keeps walking on all her four limbs to imitate the elephants and mowgli march and sings akung akung.