One of the biggest delights, I find, as a parent of a young child is all of the great new words and phrases that appear on a daily basis. I never know what is going to come out of the mouth of my two-year-old, and that is a good thing.
Sometimes the words can be funny and make me laugh, either because of the pronunciation, or because they are unexpected. One phrase that always makes me smile and makes me prompt my little one to repeat it occurs near bedtime, when he rinses out his toothbrush. He proudly tells everyone: “I washed my toothbrush.” It comes out more like “I wash my boothbus!” and is said so emphatically, that it makes everyone smile.
When you ask him to do something that he doesn’t want to do, he’ll utter a quick, “No Way!” And, when you insist that he does what you ask or tell him that he can’t have a cookie before dinner, he utters: “Oh Man!” He has also started calling his older brother “Wawa,” the name of a local convenience store here, because he knows it drives that brother batty. And yes, he can pronounce his brother’s name correctly when he wants to do so.
These little words and phrases have a way of sticking with you as a parent, even as other people roll their eyes at you after they have heard you gush about it for the twentieth time. My mother, used to tell everyone, even after I achieved adulthood, about my own verbal skills. She like to relate how when I was a toddler with a cold, I told everyone to stay away from me because I was “contaminated.” A friend of mine has a two-year-old who used to pronounce the word vacuum so that it sounded as if he was cursing everyone out. While it is a good thing that he grew out of that pronunciation, I think I can hear the nostalgia in her voice when she talks about it.
What words and phrases does your baby like to say that you think are cute or funny?
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