isoglossia — pending reconstruction

Dear Adam,
It wasn’t so long ago that we told you that we’re in no particular hurry for you to get on with the whole speaking thing. By this point, we’re like, okay, so talk already. You certainly are taking your time. One thing in particular that vexes me is that you refuse to say Papa. Yes, I know that being vexed by this is without doubt the most unoriginal, clichéd thing a father can do. It is probably part of our male DNA or something. The thing is, we know that you can say Papa yet you steadfastly refuse to do so. Your mama maintains that you make a distinction between her and me thus: when you refer to her, it is Mummamumma; when it’s me you’re talking about, it’s Ummumummum. W, I ask, TF?

In terms of speech development, your latest (and really only new) active lexical item falls firmly into the camp of onomatopoeia and reflects your sudden obsession with motor vehicles, especially big ones. This ‘word’ involves lots of unvoiced bilabial plosives and alveolar Slurm^®, and I will not attempt to transcribe it here. We’ll just say that it’s your number-one utterance this month (if we don’t count as an utterance “whining incessantly yea unto the ends of our wits“). You make it both indoors while playing with your trucks and diggers and flywheel-powered Red Chinese Stretch Limo (RCSL), and out, pointing at and mimicking every car and truck that passes. It’s good to see you branching out linguistically. In fact, you’re so fixated on heavy equipment that your two dump trucks threaten to supplant the Straszny Lew as your top cribmate.

We don’t know where the obsession with vehicles comes from. Again, I think this must be hard-wired into the male DNA, though had you been born female I suppose that would raise unsettling questions about the existence of a Barbie^® gene.

Your passive vocabulary is impressive, on the other hand, and bilingual at that. You seem to understand pretty much everything we say to you, and will even carry out our commands and requests, in English or Polish, if you happen to feel like it, although so far we haven’t had much luck with things like, “Adam, could you enrich this uranium for us?” or anything too technical. Bringing the sippy cup to the high chair, that you can handle.

So, about this whining. Our theory is that you whine out of frustration at being still just pre-lingual, that you want to express certain wishes, needs, strongly-held opinions, strenuous objections, and the like but simply can’t yet do it. There are days when the whining and caterwauling are like a drill to the brainpan, and despite what we said back in Month 14 about being in no hurry for you to talk, now we are really looking forward to the day when you can simply tell us that you hate us and spare the drama.

Recent fine weather has done a lot in the way of keeping your mother from deposting you in the nearest Dumpster^®. You do not react well to being cooped up in the apartment when the weather doesn’t cooperate, and when it’s crappy we can expect a corresponding up-tick in shiraz consumption. Lately, though, you’ve been having some fine spring times. On Sunday we took you to the beach. Since you’ve developed such a mania for the local sandbox, we thought we should demonstrate that it’s merely a simulacrum of the real thing. Slovenia being short on sandy beaches, we went over to Grado, in Italy, which boasts broad stretches of sand sluiced down the Isonzo (neé Soča) and deposited in a dramatic delta. You ate a great deal of what nature has been working these millennia to achieve.

Your motor skeelz are charging right along. This is the month when you more or less mastered the use of the fork and spoon (lovely silver objects from your godparents), and when we say “mastered” we mean “ceased to use exclusively as a catapult and occasionally employ as a tool for actual eating.” You seem very pleased with yourself when you use the fork successfully but we understand completely that occasionally a guy has to take a break and just stuff the capers in by hand.

Much has previously been made of your stunt-baby training, and you continue to hone your skills there, too. Your running about has become most fluent, both indoors and out, and it really can be a challenge for two reasonably spry adults just to keep you contained, Border Collie-like. Your love of all things motorized acts like an irresistible magnet drawing you into traffic. Your mother is not kidding when she says we need to get you a leash. Why not? You already love digging through the rubbish, chasing cars and drinking out of the toilet.

Overall, the most striking thing about your development during the last month has been watching the increasing sophistication of your playing. It never stops, for one thing. You fling open the door to the front room as early as 6.00 am and race directly to your toybox to fossick about for your RCSL or your dumptruck. On alternate mornings, you go directly to the sofa, grains of sleep still hanging in the corners of your eyes, and pry a cushion off to serve as a diving pit. Or you may grab a book immediately, perhaps one of the new ones your grandma sent featuring diggers or pictures of delicious sandy beaches. And it goes on from there for 14 hours with hardly a pause to eat or nap. One interesting development has been your self-consciousness; you’ve figured out that you are funny to us, and now make efforts to entertain us. One of your methods we call “crazy running,” in which you run around with utmost franticity, shaking your head in weird, brain-jarring gyrations until you collapse from your own laughter (and ours) or collide with a doorframe — also producing collapse, but less funny (to you). Your other preferred method of cracking up everyone in the house involves tickling the tummies of both parents, inserting tiny index finger into navels or Whoopie-Cushioning on our exposed bellies with a liplock and forceful expulsion of Slurm^®. Cracking us up cracks you up and that cracks us up even more until we are all gasping on the floor from the sheer hilarity of it all. You’re a fun little person to have living with us.

You’re so much fun to be around, Adam. Sometimes we can hardly bear to put you to bed.