I Got It!

There are so many things my daughter sees and hears that I'm not even aware of. Her language skills are developing so fast I can't even begin to keep up with all of the things she says now. Every now and again she says something that just makes me stop and laugh. I used to wonder where she even learned it from, and then I slowly realized that they are all things that I say without even being aware of it. It started as far back as when she first started saying 'no'. She had this very definitive short way of saying it, where everyone knew that she clearly meant it and there was no changing her mind. It was so funny to hear that out of this cute little face, and we wondered where it came from. Then one day I walked into my bosses office and he asked me a quick question, to which I replied, without any hesitation, a quick, very definite, no. And then it hit me….she learned it from me. I've tried watching everything that I say in front of her, and sadly it's just impossible to catch everything. Luckily for me, she hasn't really picked up anything bad. Most of them are actually rather cute and I thought I'd share some of them.


One of the silliest to me is that I noticed that her yes and no had become okay and nope. For example, she will say "Drink?" I'll say "You need a drink?" and she replies "okay!" She'll randomly say cupcake, and I'll repeat it to make sure that's what she said and she quickly says okay, and then of course I feel obligated to get her one. Oh, the power of suggestion, of course she knows how to use it before the age of two! On the other hand if we now ask her to do something or eat something that she doesn't want she replies with "nope" and that's that. I recognized the nope right away as something that I say, but the okay took a little bit longer. One night my husband was going into the kitchen to get a drink and asked if I wanted ice cream and as soon as I said "Okay!" I knew where she got it from.

Walking through Target one day, we saw a big purple ball that she just had to have. I got it out of the big tall cage and let her carry it around. It was almost as big as she was, and her little arms could barely fit around it, yet she insisted on walking through the store with it. Every once in a while she would drop it and it would start to roll away. The first time it happened she yelled "uh oh" and started to run after it yelling "I got it, I got it, I got it!" until she did, in fact, get it. I heard people around me laughing and all I could do was shake my head and chuckle. Later that week she was reaching for a cup that I knew she was going to spill. I quickly picked it up and said, "Here, I got it," and that's when I realized that I do say it quite often.


She has also learned the use of the word maybe. We were watching one of her favorite shows, Bubble Guppies, one morning right after she woke up. It was about fossils and dinosaurs. They were digging and found a bone that they thought might be a dinosaur bone. My daughter sat up right away and said "dinosaur bone?" I asked, "Do you think they found a dinosaur bone?" and she said "Maybe!" I couldn't help but laugh, and it just makes you realize that they understand way more than we think they do. Just yesterday we were getting our coats on to leave and I asked her if we were going to the park and she said "I think so!" I guess it's only a matter of time before I realize how frequently I say that as well J