Communicating with my son has become learning a foreign language. All parents go through some form of this interpreting skill as our children learn to talk. We hear it every day, so we can interpret the babbling into coherence for others. For example, with Lizzy, she became so used to us asking her if she wanted "more drink" that when she does want more drink, she asks "Moink?" We're working on breaking that one word into two.
With Darin, not only do we have to interpret the words he can speak, we have to understand what those mean to him so we can use them appropriately. Our latest development has been "castle ball". For those of you who haven't learned this new phrase from Darin in the last week, can you guess what that means?
Did you guess miniature golf? Well, that's what "castle ball" is. We took the kids to play minature golf last weekend and there is a castle on the course. Thus, castle ball was born. Darin loves to play miniature golf, and as we take him to play castle ball in the coming weeks, we'll be working on learning "miniature golf" instead of "castle ball". It is all about learning his language and then finding a way to teach him the words most people use. With something like "castle ball", it is easy because it is so tangible. But I know there will be words that he will find his own way of interpreting that will be harder to conceptualize for teaching purposes.
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A bit of a tangent, but this totally reminded me of when Mariah was really little. Someone had broken a glass in the kitchen, and my mom had warned us all not to walk in the kitchen barefoot for awhile (until she knew she'd completely gotten up every last speck of glass). Mariah needed something from the kitchen and asked for help because she couldn't go in the kitchen "dog-footed." We couldn't figure out what "dog-footed" meant... until we realized: our dog's name was Bear.
ReplyDeleteLOL... the way a kid's brain processes things sometimes is pretty funny.