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There She Grows

It seems her too-early mastery of the English language has started to make the whole thing seem old hat. Because Lil has begun making up her own new language entirely. Just experimenting I guess, but its hilarious/awesome. It started awhile ago, and she’s expanded upon it since. When she plays around with her Lilahspeak, we can usually tell what she’s conveying but its definitely her own brand new words. And often, she plays with rhyming. Its like she’s got her own cockney rhyme slang going. She’ll substitute a rhyming word in place of another word in a sentence, and crack herself up doing it. Or she’ll play around with letters and sounds: muh mar mu moing min mere, mommy? instead of what are you doing in there. Its funny when others hear this kind of stuff occur, they think its her cute silly 2-yr old way of trying to speak. And I think she gets a kick out of that, too. Fooling people. Its like a little secret.

Its also a reminder to me that I have to get this kid some Spanish. She’s just so rife for new language challenges right now and there’s no excuse if I don’t give her that opportunity. Sure, unlike so many other kids around these parts, we don’t have a spanish-speaking Nanny to accomplish this. But its not like I don’t have years of school spanish vocab in the vault somewhere. There’s plenty I can teach her, translation-wise, but she needs to hear it in context from real spanish speakers. I’ve enlisted her good friends next door to speak to her only in Spanish but that hasn’t panned out so far. I don’t think they realized I was serious.

I took her to a session of Habla Blah Blah, a spanish-immersion music class for little ones (how awesome is that name?). The class itself did not seem worth enrolling in right now but the songs are perfect. So we got their CD (thanks karen!), and it has quickly become Lilah’s most requested car music. She’s heard it 3 or 4 times and has already started to sing along to parts. Lil has an uncanny knack for remembering songs and loves to sing them. I try to tell her what everything in the songs means; she is quite intrigued. She gets some of it. Mostly I think she just loves the fun voices and catchy tunes, but this is a start. What other great spanish kids music is out there?

Oh and by the way, Lil knows one thing in Hebrew: L’Chaim!