Sunday, January 09, 2011

conversations with my daughter

Ever since Miya first started using words, I’ve been having little conversations with her.

At first, these conversations mostly consisted of a lot of word repetition. “Duck” she’d say, pointing at a duck in a picture book. “Duck,” I would repeat.

I would ask her to name things. “Miya, what’s this?” I’d say, pointing to a picture of a cow. For awhile cows were “boo.” “That’s right, moo,” I’d say. “It’s a cow and cows say moo.”

About a month ago I got pretty excited when I realized that Miya was actually starting to tell me things – albeit in response to some very leading questions. Usually at dinner time we talk about her day.
“Did you go to playgroup today,” I’d ask.
“Yeah!” she’d say. Then after a pause she might add something like “Beth”, the name of her facilitator.
“Did you see Beth?”
“Yeah!”
“Who else did you see? Did you see Zach?”
“Yeah!.... hand”
“Did you hold Zach’s hand?”
“Yeah!”

And so our conversation would go. She’d supply words which I would expand on and use to prompt her with more questions. What was neat was her offering new words like “hand” to tell me something I didn’t already know.

These days our conversations are still a lot of leading questions, with me filling in the blanks. But her memory is getting better, so now she refers to things that may have happened a few days or even weeks ago, making it harder sometimes to guess what she is talking about. Like when she came home today and said, “Pooping!” and I needed to remember that she is referring to seeing a cow poop a few days ago. Or when she says “Sheep sniff” it is in reference to a game we once played with puppet sheep at the library.

But sometimes I am a little stumped when it comes to filling in the blanks. Take, for example, a conversation we had tonight which went something like this:
“Daddy cooking,” Miya said.
“Is Daddy in the kitchen cooking? What is he cooking?”
“Baby.”
“Um... what kind of baby is Daddy cooking?”
“Miya.”

And then I just don’t know where to go with that.

3 comments:

  1. Worst daddy ever

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  2. Daddy was cooking dinner for Miya. Even I know that and I haven't had to speak baby for about 19 years.
    mostly I wanted to comment because Miya's picture is SO cute!
    I can't wait to see her next month!!

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  3. Yeah, I figured out that if you added 'for' it wasn't quite so strange. But it was still quite funny at the time.

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