(There are three geckos in my sister’s house & David was awed by them!)
I used to worry that David would speak late as I saw many of his little friends who talked a lot. At 18 months he hardly called me mama. Then before leaving to the Phils, I came across a book that said, “toddlers who walk early tend to talk late as their brain is busy mastering the skill of walking, running and all the physical stuff”. It gave me some comfort. David started his first steps at 9 months and had been trying to master that skill.
Now, there’s no stopping of his mouth. Anything comes out of it and I feel delighted everytime he blurts out coherent perfect words.
He has learnt some bisaya words as we spent almost three months in the Phils. “ayaw ba” (no), “ayaw lagi” (an insistent no), “biko and puto” (rice cake cooked in coconut milk and sugar), “tuko” (a gecko, but he sometimes says kuto which means lice), “nanay” (grandma or old woman), “baboy” (pig), “ayo” with matching knock on the wall or door (it means knock-knock). He tries to scare off people by saying “hala! hala!” He goes “wowowee” (a prime time show on Phil tv and when ask, “David game ka na ba?” he goes “em na” with fist on the air. He should be on Kris’s show lol. When he is told Pacquiao, he goes boxing his own two fists and say karate, he goes “ya ya ya!” Of course all these bring the family into a fit of laughter. Everybody was so proud and excited to see that their half-french tiny head could learn the other language quite easily. But then again, they think David is Kinkoy!
Of all the words that he mastered so far nothing is sweeter than mama. At last. Says it when he needs me, when he is happy and wants to share such happiness with me. He says mama at the right moment and on the right situation. And nothing is more gratifying to the heart really.
English is still his dominant language as his cousins spoke English to him and well everybody else. I no longer have to check the clock to see when is his next bottle as he asks for it himself. He says what he wants to take, juice, water, dede (for milk), banana, bread or biscuit. He says plane and gets really high at the airports.
He is not friendly with strangers but in NAIA while waiting for our plane, one of the stewards spotted David running from wall to wall as planes took off and landed, excited he went to take David’s hand and showed him planes on the runway. David didn’t hesitate for a moment. He grabbed the steward’s hand and ran to the glass wall, to the amazement of the others. You see he was the only toddler there and the loudest.
He gave me this weird look during our flight from Kuala Lumpur to Paris when a flight attendant told him she’ll bring him some chocolates and when David ate one, it wasn’t choco. They weren’t. They were some fruity-chewy-sweets. I assured David they were not chocolates and that they were candies. Understood, he threw away the candies and tagged my hand asking for chocolates which by the way he says “koleyt”. I always bring around those tooth-enemies for emergencies and he splurged on it with gusto.
Here’s one thing that I’ve been questioning myself if I was ever right to teach him the word “bad”. Long before his first birthday, when he got hurt like bumping his head or falling down on something, I always tapped the enemy and exclaimed “bad table, or bad chair or bad wall!” It always stopped his cry and somehow brought some consolation to the anguish. Naturally he learnt this. Unfortunately, confirming my uneasiness about it, he extended such gesture to other people. My mother was playing with him one time and in the middle of the game David bumped his head to my mom’s forehead. You guess how he reacted. He gave my mom a whack on her forehead and said, “bad head!” Mother was dumbfounded.
He says plenty of words correctly and the one I personally reluctant to hear is “mama lie down” tapping the pillow beside his. That practically means that at time of sleeping and bottle feeding my head has to be just as close to his. I can’t blame him, three months of sleeping with me, one develops a habit. Now that we are back, he has to unlearn that habit and understand that the bedroom full of toys and weird looking things is not just a playroom. It is his bedroom.
