Friday, 18th April 2008.

Sentences and Sensibility

I think I've talked here before about the words you use around your children, and how you have to pick them carefully. I can't remember the point when I realised that swearing in front of Joshua had gone from something you did occasionally, when you couldn't help it, to something that should never happen under any circumstances - when I realised he'd made the jump from merely listening to the tone of your voice to actually picking up the words. What's fun is the way that a child will accumulate vocabulary and use it without any prompting or encouragement, and the pleasure you get from these occasions far outweighs all the effort you spend getting them to say 'please' and 'thank you'.

Josh, for example, has recently picked up the word 'scallywag', which I use whenever he's wriggling around in the middle of a changing session. It's generally used as a term of endearment, despite its negative connotations in, for example, Pirates of the Caribbean: my father used it on me, and I daresay his father before him. Every family has these little private jokes, and we're no different.

It wasn't until last week, however, that I realised just how much it had sunk in, as I struggled with a liner that he'd decided to use to wipe his backside.
"Josh! What are you doing?"
"It's toilet paper."
"No it's not! It's a liner!"
"It's toilet paper, you scallywag!"

I laughed until I cried. You probably had to be there, but what got me was the sense of spontaneity, coupled with an inherent respect for the rules - he'd taken a word that I generally only ever use when I'm changing him and used it back on me while I was changing him, as if he somehow respected when that there was a time and a place for its implementation. It was the same sense of surprise that I got a few weeks back when he started singing the alphabet song in the bath - a song that I've never taught him, and certainly not one that he picked up from TV, given that he's never watched an episode of Sesame Street in his life (hey, it's not our fault that Channel 4 have stopped showing it). I deduced that he'd picked it up from a V-Tech toy that he owns and has used relatively sparingly, and while he was only going for a phonetic recreation of the letters, rather than the actual letters, I couldn't help but be a little impressed.

Thomas' vocabulary has yet to progress beyond the da-da-da-da-das of infancy, keying up (at least if current indications are anything to go by) for 'Dada' as his first word proper. I feel guilty for encouraging this, because it took Joshua ages to say 'Mummy', so it's a lesson you'd think I'd have learned. But instead whenever Thomas jumps into his "Da-da-da" routine my instinct is to imitate him, when what I should be doing is saying "Ma-ma-ma-ma-ma" instead. By the time I remember this it's too late. Still, he may surprise us: his brother's first designated word was 'fish'.

Josh, for his part, went through a stuttering phase not long after Christmas. He'd sit for a while stumbling over a particular word - we'd be reading a book one night and when I asked him for the identity of a particular animal, the reply would be "It's an e-el-e-e-el-e-e-, an el-e-e-e-el-e-e...I don't know". It was simultaneously amusing and heartbreaking, because you could sense the frustration in his voice. I felt like Simon Cowell listening to Gareth Gates (although Joshua's a better singer, and my trousers aren't nearly so high up).

We were worried for a while, but a little expert advice from Emily's sister (who is training in speech therapy) convinced us that it was just a phase. And, sure enough, it was - he progressed from violent stammering to learning to take a deep breath whenever he was fumbling over his words, and even that now seems to have stopped. We eventually realised that he was trying to form a coherent sentence with everything he said, rather than just relying on a one- or two-word answer. And he's now more or less mastered that, and it's this sort of yardstick that makes you realise that it's pointless to ever compare your child to anybody else's, because they're all different. He won't potty train - which irritates me - but at least he can talk proper.

I read this week that the strange, flawed sentences of children are actually generated using a system of logic that they've developed. For example, a child might say "She goed to the shops", which is adopting the standard practice of adding -ed onto the end of words to indicate past tense. The transposition of the word 'go' with 'went' isn't something that they pick up until later. Similarly, Josh might say to me "I did run up and down the house", again indicating the past tense, because the words "I did" are already in there as a set reply for the affirmative when I've asked him about something in the past that Mummy tells me that he's done.

This sort of sentence construction spills out from rhetoric into a world view - child logic is notoriously skewiff, but it makes perfect sense to the child. Still, there are other times when I'm not sure whether Joshua's assumptions and statements come about as the result of his own system of logic, or whether he's just being random. This was epitomised by a bathtub conversation we had on Wednesday. Bathtub conversations with Josh can be great fun or terribly dull, depending on what sort of mood we're in. I have tried to be Good Father this past week or so, which means making an effort and actually finding fun things to talk about rather than just reacting to what he's doing.

"Is your name Steven, then?" I asked, teasing him slightly. This is a game we'll play: I'll read 'Dear Zoo' and deliberately read out the wrong animal names, and he'll correct me with "It's not a hippo, it's a camel!". (It also led to my Aunt Angela incorrectly assuming that I really *didn't* know the difference between a leopard and a tiger.)

Usually this animal-swapping game is quite fun, but I think I may have pushed it too far the other day when he started to cry during my rendition of 'Postman Pat', as delivered to Thomas. We asked Joshua what on earth was the matter, and he sobbed "It's not a black-and-white zebra, it's a black-and-white cat!". Suitably chastened, I returned to the book and made sure to sing the correct lyrics this time.

As a parenthesis, the strangest things set him off. My mother found this out the hard way last year when she was pretending that one of his toys was hers, and that he couldn't have it. Normally this makes him laugh, but it turns out that you can't do it with Frank the Monkey. The other week it was my father's turn, when he pretended to pull off his thumb. And the other night I suggested a race down to the bedroom as a way of getting him down there for his bath: when I said that I'd be the fastest he immediately burst into tears and said "No, you're not!". He's also become quite strange with the television - certain Muppet show scenes now appear to spook him, and he once got frightened at something he saw on Numberjacks. I wouldn't mind but he'd already seen that episode. The same day.

Anyway - there we were in the bathroom, chattering away, when I asked him "Is your name Steven?".
"No, it's Joshua."
"Do you know your other name?"
"Joshua...Baldock!"
"Right, but you're also called Joshua Michael Baldock. Do you know where the 'Michael' comes from? Who do we know who's called Michael?"
A pause. Then "Mike?"

He's only met Emily's ex a handful of times, and only once recently, but by all accounts he's made quite an impression.
"Yes, that's right," I said. "Although that's not who I was thinking about. No, Granddad's name is Michael. Michael Knight. One day you'll understand why that's funny."
<splash>
"Do you know mummy's name?"
"Emily!"
"And mine?"
"It's James."
"And do you know what Gramps' name is?"
Another pause.
"Gramps!"
"Well, yes. Actually his name is David. But you call him Gramps, don't you? And I call him 'Dad', because he's my dad, just like I'm your daddy."
"And Mike is Thomas' daddy."
"No, Mike is not Thomas' daddy. I am."

At least it wasn't in the middle of a church service. I do think that he sometimes gets the parent roles confused. Last night, when we were (as a special treat) bathing together, he insisted that I was Mummy, because I had nipples.
"Hang on a minute," I said, pointing to his chest. "What are these?"
"My nipples!"
"Right. And you're not Mummy, are you?"

Whatever our linguistic differences, the parent-child bond does at least mean that I can rely on my son's unconditional support - most of the time, at least. If you ask him to affirm something that you're saying, he'll generally go along with you. This does occasionally backfire, as was the case when Emily and her mother and I were all arguing about the pronunciation of the word 'scone' - I, being a southerner to the core, believe that it should rhyme with 'bone', while they vehemently insisted that it rhymes with 'gone'. I asked Josh for his opinion, being sure to place the words in such an order that he'd pick mine, based purely on what I'd observed of his preference scheme in the past. The little ratbag sided with them. I have since disinherited him.

The odd anomaly aside, he is at least willing to back me up by laughing at puns that he has no way of understanding, and by generally going along with whatever I say as long as it doesn't have a negative impact on him. The other afternoon, when we were preparing dinner, was a prime example.

"Thomas likes this raisin bread," said Emily from the kitchen.
"It does look nice," I replied. "Is it made from self-raisin' flour? Geddit? Raising / raisin?"
"Yes, dear."
"Oh, I'm a wag. Am I a wag, Josh?"
"You are," came the response from the floor.

There was another pause.

"Are you a scallywag?"