My son Lev is 11 months. He’s talking with aluminium cans. Just rolls them right and left with his sausage fingers, and tries to reach the bottom. I don’t know what fascinates him so. He’s learned to turn pages in his cardboard books, and now it’s one of his favorite passtimes. Just sitting there, paging through the book, pushing it aside, grabbing the next one from the pile, paging through it, pushing it aside, etc. When he gets tired he turns to my books whose pages are not that sturdy. Recently we were in the Borders bookstore in Palo Alto. I brought him to the baby cardboard books section on the second floor. He grabbed a couple, pulled them down from the shelf and never gave them a second look. Then moved to the adjacent section on parenting and started emptying the shelves methodically. Is it something about parenting he wanted to tell me? Maybe he just prefers the flip of the paperbacks over the crackle of the hardcover.

He babbles constantly. Now he knows how to point to things and call them names. “Kaka”. I looked the word up in the English dictionary. Kaka is a New Zeland parrot (Nestor meridionalis). In Russian it’s a children’s word for feces or anything you should not touch, like cigarette butt, or dead squirrel, or a shred of an ice-cream wrap stuck in the sand. (I swear I never taught him the word!) It also means 'persimmon' in Italian (and I spent some time in Italy when pregnant with him). “Kaka!” he says, definitely trying to show me the object and communicate that he can see it too. And this is his very own language.



- posted by ET @ 10:10 PM