Watching my toddler figure out how to language is fascinating. Yesterday we were stumped when he kept insisting there was a “Lego winner” behind his bookshelf - it turned out to be a little Lego trophy cup. Not knowing the word for “trophy”, he’d extrapolated a word for “thing you can win”. And then, just now, he held up his empty milk container and said, “Mummy? It’s not rubbish. It’s allowed to be a bottle.” - meaning, effectively, “I want this. Don’t throw it away.” But to an adult ear, there’s something quite lovely about “it’s allowed to be a bottle,” as if we’re acknowledging that the object is entitled to keep its title even in the absence of the original function.
Ever since I wrote this post, barely a week has passed where I haven’t seen new notifications for it, as more and more people add their own stories about kids and language - and that’s delightful. But when I check my activity tab, because I never gave this post a proper title, my notifications show me instead a fragment of the opening line - Watching my toddler figure out how to language… - and it always makes me laugh, because time has passed, and he’s not a toddler anymore. When I originally wrote this post - on my phone, in the car, on December 20th, 2016 - my son was 3, talking about a plastic bottle of chocolate milk we’d bought him at a service station stop on a drive to stay with family; lo these seven years later, on March 5th, 2024, he’s 11, playing Roblox with his friends while listening to music from Hollow Knight on his laptop. Yet this snapshot of his toddlerhood remains, unchanged, as though he’d never aged all - and while there’s something lovely about that, as dates on tumblr are so often opaque, I thought I should also offer an update :)
