Boot Shoes!

I asked Beatrice what she was doing and she said she was "baking a cake for Mommy Ami." "What is in the cake?" I asked her. "Corn!" she replied definitively. Then to Celeste she added, "Eat this!"

I know everyone's probably tired of hearing it by now, but I continue to be totally amazed by the rate at which Beatrice is picking up new words - by now she can talk about pretty much any object in her daily life, and she's adding more adjectives, verbs, abstract concepts (like "scary" and "happy"), and full sentences. Every day she shocks me by saying some new thing I had no idea she knew, like "I'm baking a cake," "Food makes the doggies happy," or yes, "Starbucks."

But a particularly funny verbal mannerism she's picked up is the use of two-word phrases where one word is general and the other specific. For example, she calls her boots "boot shoes," and her stuffed duck (technically a stuffed least tern) "bird duck," and she calls butter "butter cheese" (based on the mistaken impression that butter is a type of cheese). She calls motorcycles "motorcycle cars" and grapes "grape berries."

There are also a few words she continually says incorrectly. Elephants are "amis" (pronounced like "ah, me") - the stuffed Babar and Celeste dolls that Dev's parents handed down to us from when their kids were young are "Daddy Ami" and "Mommy Ami." When she hands us something she says "Ah, go" (presumably for "there you go") and when she wants you to help her open something, she asks "Ah, me?" (Yes, it sounds the same as the word for elephant.) She also refers to her favorite food, macaroni and cheese, as "hot cheese."