Kid-Speak, version 2.0

I really love this 2 year old stage. I think it is so much fun to listen and try to interpret what she is saying. Her vocabulary is probably several hundreds of words now, strung together in intelligible toddler gibberish. Remember how I said before how she was having trouble pronouncing K's and hard G's? Guess what happened when we moved to her new day care? Her classmates' names were (ahem...):

-Kendall
-Gavin
-Scarlett
-Paxton and
-Ivy

Number 1: I never thought I would be so happy to meet an Ivy in my whole life. Number 2: I love the fact that there is a little girl named Scarlett in the Kid's class. We are really in the South now. I have been making all kinds of lame "Gone With the Wind" jokes that I think are funny but the teachers are probably tired of. Number 3: I love that the Kid pronounces her name as "Star-lick". Dipthongs are difficult when you just started talking, people!

Other new favorites are songs that I haven't sung since I was 3 years old, such as:

"I'm Bringing Home a Baby Bumblebee" - gruesome, but entertaining; "No More Monkeys Jumping on the Bed" - a cautionary tale of closed head injuries; "Happy Birthday to You" - quite frankly I am getting a little sick of this one; and finally "The Wheels on the Bus" - which my sister has turned into a civil rights teaching moment (apparently the driver on the bus says "move on back, because you're black, move on back" - at that point I took the phone away from the Kid and told her to ignore her Auntie ).
My husband and I have also resorted to calling each other "Sweetie" instead of by our first names because of the Kid's propensity to shout at us by our first names when she is looking for us. It is very entertaining to be called "sweetie" by a toddler. Or "sweetheart" or whatever term of endearment has gotten stuck in her brain this week.

A new phenomenon is the stating of random letters and numbers that we didn't know she knew, like the letter Q or the number 5. Apparently, today she shook my husbands hand and said "Nice to meet you!". At least she is learning manners along with all the possibly bad habits we are teaching her (as in scolding her baby dolls not to touch Mama's computer...). I have no idea where she got such a notion.