Distracted Daddy

She doesn’t speak in complete sentences yet. Just. Sentence. Fragments. But she’s speaking. She’s learning a new language, English. By the sound of it, it’s her second language. Crying was her first.

And like Luke Skywalker stranded on the moon base of Endor, I can communicate with this cute little primitive creature through a few key phrases and a lot of pointing. A lot of pointing. Like the Ewoks, my daughter mainly uses her words to identify objects that she’s directly pointing to. If she points at a soother and says “soothe”, I know what she wants.

Even with the pointing, our communication isn’t easy. Some days she’s Lassie and I’m trying to guess what’s down the well. Other days it’s like interviewing someone from a live satellite feed – there’s a delay.

Her pronunciation is the biggest obstacle. Ps sound like Ds. Ms sound like Ns. She says entire sentences using only vowels. She makes consonant sounds that don’t exist. The few words that she pronounces with clarity were her first words: daddy, mummy, and hi.

Even then it often seems like only my wife and I can truly understand what our daughter’s saying. Friends and relatives don’t hear what we’re hearing. They lack the parental gene that can understand a toddler’s early speech. To them it’s still babbling. They’re like tourists in a foreign land and we’re their guides/translators.

So in an effort to relieve us of our unpaid translation duties, here’s my Lonely Planet phrasebook guide to toddler. Common words that my daughter uses and what they sound like to the un-parental ear.

With those few words and many more my daughter and I somehow are able to have a dialogue. Admittedly the dialogue is often about poop or involves pointing out facial features but we’re talking and if she’s anything like her mother my daughter’s not going to stop.