Wordpants Tickets

So there was this article in the NY Times yesterday -- "From Birth, Engage Your Child With Talk".

Basic gist of it was that parents need to talk to their children more, and communicate in every way possible from a very young age in order to foster verbal skills, and that maybe people aren't doing that as much as they used to in the good ol' days. (Ahhh, the good ol' days, when all parents were perfect.) j/k, j/k....

After reading the article, I felt all smugly self-satisfied, because I'd have to say that Joe and I would score high marks from the author based on how much we talked to and read to Georgia before she could speak.

Um, except for our propensity to use totally made up words that are now a part of Georgia's vocabulary. Oops. What would the author make of these common household utterances?

Bathitoso
Pee Pee Town
Stephania
Toots Mulroney Grande
Show-show
Aco (=Aquaphor)
Mush Wipe (word stolen from Beth's house)
Flow-flows
Phony (or Phony McRing Ring)
Comfypants
Moto (=the remote)

I'm sure there's a slew of others that I can't recall right now. It would go against Joe's nature not to use dozens of fake words. Bastardized Spanglish is the best! And the nicknames? Where would be without those?

What are your favorite fake words, or toddler-isms that you've picked up?

In (semi-) related news...and I don't know if this is funny or just sad, so I'm going with hilarious...Joe's been teaching Georgia "Take Me Out to the Ballgame". Yesterday she kept trying to sing it, except at the Cracker Jack line she says, "buy me some peanuts and tree nuts." Um, I guess the allergy message is sinking in.

Also...for some reason Georgia has confused the word "tasty" with "spicy" and therefore frequently protests that things are too tasty to eat. Funny to watch her spit something out with an awful face saying, "It's too tasty!"

Also...language development is the coolest thing to watch unfold. You can hear Georgia working on the past tense now by adding an "ed" to all verbs. "I doed it." "You taked it." It's kinda sweet.