Conversations with a 2.5 year old

Two recent conversations with Jaida come to mind. The first started as we were discussing her new pre-school and how she would be attending this Fall. Her immediate response was "I don't want to fall and get a bump when I am at my school". I explained that Fall is a word that has two meanings. It means tipping over and possibly getting a bump and also a time of year. I explained that the year is divided into four parts ... Winter, Spring, Summer and Fall. Fall is a couple of months away and is the time of year when she will start going to her new school. She was nodding her head like she understood and then suddenly I hear a little whimper and the words "but mama I don't want to fall and get a bump". We now say she will start school in the Autumn ... she likes this MUCH better.

We also talked about how people in different countries speak different languages. How every object can be called by many different names depending on the language being spoken. I figured this is a concept that we could easily deal with since she is very into saying Spanish words right now and she seems to understand that the colors have an English and Spanish name as do the numbers. So we were talking about all the different ways we can say hello. Hello, hola, salaam, guten tag, namaste, ciao, konnyeje wa, neih hou, etc. She loves practicing this but now thinks she can only say hello to our cat Isis in German ... "guten tag Isis cat" is a common thing to hear in our house.

There is also the forever popular and entertaining public conversation about who she thinks has penises and who has vulvas complete with finger pointing at the individuals . That is an oldie but a goodie. ;)

There are also words that she says that are just fun to say. There are three words that I highly doubt I will ever again be able to pronounce correctly ... hangigurger (hamburger), fridgelator (refrigerator) and froffie (froggie). The alternate pronunciation is just too much fun to say. ;) Oh also referring to cats as maus (meows) ... that has just stuck ... we no longer have cats we have two maus.