Bopwan Fooleg Waffles Ehnosoo Bop Elmo Aaangto Dora!

It started about two weeks ago. The speaking in complete sentences, I mean. Alexis and I drug Daddy to a playground. He claims he is going to die of boredom at a park someday. Apparently watching your one-year old squeal with glee as she slides isn't exciting enough for him. On that particular day, he was in luck. Just as Alexis managed to climb to the top of Mt. Slide Alot, my nose detected a familiar odor. I don't know about you, but I consider slide time done when there's a present in a diaper. Nothing good can come of leaving that situation as is for any length of time, especially when sitting and squishing is most likely involved. So we went back to the car and did a quick change. At that particular park, it's about a five minute walk to and from the playground, so Daddy decided we were done. He strapped little Miss So Fresh and So Clean in her car seat just as she started saying "I want to slide." She said it nicely at first, but as we started to back out of the parking lot, it quickly turned to "I WANT TO SLIDE, DAMN IT!" (OK, maybe she didn't actually say "damn it", but it was definately implied.). There was much screaming and hollering, but it was quickly silenced by some parental pride. After all, no other child has ever before managed to put four words together to create a sentence.

Perhaps we displayed a bit too much pride. For now, no matter what she's saying, Alexis builds everything into a sentence. The problem? She's pretty limited by her vast knowledge of nouns and NO OTHER kinds of words. I think she has two verbs: want and eat. You can get pretty far with them, but we're not exactly talking about a mastery of the English language there. As for adjectives, she signs "grumpy" and can say/sign lots and lots of colors, BUT SHE HAS NO IDEA WHAT THEY MEAN. In fact, I'm really beginning to think she may be color blind. If I ask her what color something is, it's blue. It doesn't matter what it actually looks like, it's just blue. If I ask her the color of a second item, it will be whatever color I said the first thing was. And the third item? It takes on the color of the second item. When she loses track or forgets, she resorts back to blue. So without verbs or adjectives, you're pretty much stuck with making up your own words when you try to describe something. That means we get long strings of gibberish, with a real word or two thrown in for good measure. Somehow we are supposed to understand this new little person language, but it's not really working out. I know Alexis was telling me something about Elmo, Dora, and some waffles earlier, but I don't know what it was. And she's still mad at me for it.