Big Talkers

Before you become a parent, you think that a baby's first word is pretty cut and dried. One day the baby is babbling, the next day the baby looks up at you with a big smile and a chubby pointer finger and says "mama". Case closed. The truth is more complicated. For weeks, Ben has been saying "arf" when he sees a dog...or a cat...or an elephant...or basically any reasonably sized mammal. A week or so ago, he also really got the "uh-oh" concept and started throwing things on the ground so he could say "uh-oh". (This was also Ellie's first "word". Should we be worried that these kids start by talking about destruction?) Do those count as first words? I don't know. However, for the past few days Ben has been saying "ball" and he clearly knows what it means, so I think we can unequivocally say that he is talking.

Ellie, meanwhile, is a little sponge with an enormous vocabulary. Give her two more years and she'll blow the lid off the SATs (but still probably be afraid to walk in a puddle and intimidated by big goldfish in a pond...go figure.) Today we had NPR on, as always, and there was a story about how Democrats are coming up with more nuanced positions on abortion to capture moderate voters. Ellie caught on to one particularly juicy quote and repeated back to me "baby holocaust". Great, 20% of U.S. pregnancies end in abortion and now my daughter can tell you it's a "baby holocaust". And I thought sex would be tough to explain...here I was facing abortion and the holocaust in 2 year old terms??? Fortunately, she seemed pretty content to repeat the phrase a few times and not worry what it meant. Now, if only she'll forget that phrase as quickly as she learned it...