More language development

I've been struck lately at Lea's newfound ability to put words together on her own to convey her own concepts, instead of just repeating phrases she has heard (of course she still does quite a lot of that, too). Sometimes it comes out so fluently, I forget she's two, but other times, the results are amusing.

For instance:

Lea has a little squirt bottle that she plays with in the bathtub, and one night she was trying to get the lid screwed on, but couldn't. "It's stuck!" she said, which is how she often describes the state of something not happening the way she wants it to. I put the lid on the bottle as Lea watched, and then she commented with a nod, "It's not mama stuck. It's just Lea stuck." Which really, is a totally logical way for her to have processed the situation.

Another time recently, she was eating her breakfast and I asked her if she was finished with her yogurt. "No," she said. "I have still left of it."

She also has been drinking a lot of V8. The very first time she saw it, she proclaimed it "soup juice" (she's a fan of tomato soup, so you can see where she was coming from).

So it's cool, really, to see how she figures out her own way to explain things using her own sense of how the language works. Every day, I wish I could go back and take more college linguistics classes because this process is just so fascinating to me.

Other stuff is more in the adorable category. Today, Lea's been randomly saying "Let's play team!" When we ask her how you play team, she says, "Like this: TEEEEEEAAM!!!!" and starts running back and forth from our front door to the back corner of our kitchen, pretty much the longest straight line it's possible to run in our house. This has come out of the blue, and this afternoon while watching basketball, as we've been doing a lot of for the last weeks, it occurred to me that maybe that's what she's imitating. Who knows? In any case, it's hilarious.

Susanna's language development lately consists of "Ohhhhh" and "Hoooohhhhh" and "Gooooo." Which, still, thrills me. The first non-crying vocalizations are so welcome.