Baby Talk?

I guess parents of small children must experience crazy déjà vu or something when they hear crazy shit coming out of their children's mouths, only to realize these are remarks parroted directly from the source.  I find, also, with my niece, that I do not realize that I even say such things as "no, no" in that dismissive short click way.   

She has a way of cocking her head to the side when she is about to use one of my lines, or her mother's lines or her babysitter, Paula's, lines.  Her mom calls them Paula-isms… but we agreed there are plenty of other –isms in there.  A current favorite, however, is "Do you want to pee your pants?" delivered completely out of context as a joke.  It might as well be one of her knock knock or chicken cross the road jokes... that must be another post.

I am fascinated by the fact that little E. knows she is throwing one out there and how she waits for the reaction.  Little girls are crazy verbal.  Crazy. Verbal. And this one is also a budding comedian with pretty perfect timing.  Ouch, three going on thirteen or thirty sometimes...

It throws me right back to my first days teaching feeling ultra scrutinized when the students started throwing Ms.-C-isms back at me.  I modified my language because I love to curse … but I kept the curse place marker which, of course, my littlest ones LOVED.  All I could hear from them was, "Sheesh-kabob" and I would roll my eyes.   Please, stop mimicking me … you are going to get me in trouble. 

I guess turnabout is fair play since we have been having too good of a time saying E-isms for the past two years … "no, please" is no more, but we have her pronunciations to mimic with abandon at the moment:  "nuffin" and "woo-re" (for lure) and "yuv" (for love) and especially "sweep" (for sleep).  E. often proclaims at the height of her enjoyment of life, "I'm never going to be sweepy again!" That really should have been in full caps to capture her glee and enthusiasm.  I know that quickly we will have just regular sounding words… thankfully, she is full of other crazy things to keep us amused