Tuesday, December 19, 2006

Not not Night, Night

Frank and I used to joke about teaching Sophie the wrong word for something, just to see what linguistic effect we might really have on her. (You know, every time we hold up a pencil, we say "banana!" just to see when and how she might figure out that we've been messing with her.) A co-worker of mine used to think that there was a distinction between "birthday ice cream" and "regular ice cream." Turns out, her parents were just feeding her cottage cheese and telling her it was "regular." We decided that was so very, very wrong, and so very, very "irregular," and therefore abandoned all thoughts of linguistic experimentation.

Inadvertantly, though, there has been a screw-up in the Sophie synapses. We have begun the weaning process, see, and now I just nurse Sophie down at night and when she first wakes up. And every evening we say things like, "Are you almost ready for night night?" and "Time for night night now" and there's even an entire song that repeats the "Night, night, Sophie" sentiment right at the same time that she is...you guessed it: nursing. So yesterday, as soon as I got home from work, Sophie ran to me saying, "Night, night. Night, night." And she had just woken up from a nap. And she kept saying it for three more hours. This morning when I got her out of her crib she greeted me with a hearty "Night, night!" and some groping. Now we're never sure if she's tired or hungry. So much for communication.

1 comment:

Amanda Bindel said...

Too cute! Caroline signs "milk" when she wants to nurse. For a while, I think she thought my name was "milk" because she signed it every time she saw me. :-)