Barnabas Monkeypants

Last week I saw a commercial on TV where they were hawking some sort of toddler flashcards so your kids can become some super genius. This made me really, really mad and also quite sad. I have no idea why any parent would want their very young child to learn like that, when it seems to me the single best way for a child to absorb new words and concepts is to just talk and read and play with them. No?

It’s certainly easier, I guess, to just sit there and have them rattle off dog, cat, and moose while looking at flashcards then to actually walk around and point out things to them in real life (“Look at that dog, Henry” or “What a pretty yellow flower” or “Run! Run! It’s a rabid moose!”).

And it’s not as fun as when your child suddenly starts talking to you about these things seemingly out of the blue. A couple of weeks ago, when I was reading Dear Zoo (a Christmas gift from Henry’s aunt Rachel, I believe) to Henry, he started telling me what the animals were that the zoo was sending before I had the chance to tell him. (The premise of the book is that the narrator writes to the zoo to send them a pet, and the zoo, obviously trying as hard as they can to get sued, starts sending lions and camels and monkeys. Real smart, zoo.) Before, he would just make the noise when the animal appeared (ROWR! for the lion or EEE EEE! for the monkey), but now, he said  lion and monkey and camel and snake and doggy.

(An aside: Henry tends to want to add syllables to words that don’t need them. So when he says skunk, it sounds like “ska-uuun-kuk” and applesauce sounds like “applesauce-auce” and monkey is “moon-un-key”. It’s quite endearing.)

It’s really encouraging to see him learn things without the aid of flash cards or those horrid Baby Einstein videos.

So, other than the fact that Henry is having a good time talking, what else have we learned this month?

We learned that to Henry, every bird is a duck. A couple of years ago, our friend and her then 20-month-0ld daughter came over to our house and the young girl saw our plastic pink flamingo sitting in our kitchen’s bay window. “Goose! Goose!” she yelled, pointing to it. It seemed that all birds were geese to her. Robins, ducks, pigeons. All of them were geese. Cute, right? Well, Henry’s doing the same thing, but instead of goose, it’s duck. Duck this, duck that. I’m sure, just like our friend’s daughter, he’ll soon get a little more specific. Probably a good idea, considering the neighborhood sparrows are quite the snobs.

We learned that Henry can now tell us what he wants. He’s always been pretty good about saying more and all done (“more cheese” and “all done oatmeal”), but now he’s added “self” (meaning he wants to do it himself) and “help” (nice, because it cuts off frustration pretty quickly). He’s also started saying “down” (before, “up” was the catch-all for up and down, Henry’s aloha). His latest use of “more” is more abstract: “more airplane,” he’ll say, or “more firetruck,” which we suppose means he wants to get on another plane soon or wants to see more firetrucks (oh, how he loves them). Henry’s also started to say “I got it” when we try and help him (like walking up stairs) when it should be obvious to all of us that he can do it all by himself. He’s also been saying “outside” when he wants to get out of our place, and “comb” when he wants to run a comb through his (and Kristen and my) hair.

We learned that more molars have started to come in. Over the past 6 months or so, Henry’s slept through the night all but a handful of times (usually due to a spicy dinner or illness). Well, that’s not completely true. He wakes up all the time, but usually just grabs the Nuby cup we have in the crib so he can drink some water and then quickly goes back to sleep. This changed a bit this past month, as he’s gotten up in the middle of the night a half-dozen times or so because of obvious teething pain. How is it obvious, you ask? Well, when you walk into his room to try and soothe him and see that he’s ramming both of his hands into his mouth, you know it’s a teething problem. Supposedly, these final molars are the worst, and he’s been putting up with some pain. Poor kid.

We learned that while I’m still Daddy, Kristen is Mama. Not Mommy. Mama. I like this.

And we learned that, after a few months of kissless life, Henry has begun to give kisses once again. This is how it goes. It always happens right before a nap or he goes to bed for the night. I’ll put him in his Sleep Sack, sing the ABCs, and ask for a kiss. Henry will then grab my cheeks, say “Cheeks!”, then start giving me a dozen sloppy kisses, with accompanying mmmmwa’s. Even though I have to immediately wash my face after I put him in the crib, it’s well worth the mess.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 23rd, 2010 at 3:45 pm and is filed under What We've Learned. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.