Some of you may have noticed that recently our pictures have mostly fallen into two categories:
the side (or back) of Nora’s head.
Nora strapped-into a chair of some kind (stroller, high chair, etc*.).
This is because she has recently gotten too fast and wiley for our poor old 3 megapixel Canon PowerShot S410 to handle. We might have a great shot of Nora playing with blocks, but by the time the camera boots up and the lens has time to adjust focus Nora is two counties away with some old lady’s knickers on her head. So we took the plunge this week and got a new camera: a Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ28 10 megapixel wonder with 18x optical zoom, optical image stabilization, HD film recording and a host of other high tech doodads (technical term) designed to (or at least marketed as if designed to) improve our chances of getting a clear shot of the bean.
Nora texted the word ‘Ink’ to our friend Lauren this afternoon. She also helped send Zara a “Happy 4th birthday” message this weekend (from her very own gmail account, no less). And not only did she manage to call Grandma and Grandpa with Jen’s cell phone but she also managed to set up a 3-way call (which we didn’t actually know the phone could do). Who’s the master of all media now!? Unrelated picture follows.
I think most people wonder how kids seem to magically go from tiny little cooing balls of cuteness to children who can talk. This is a video of that transformation in progress. The only word Nora says in this video is ball. You can hear it when she picks the thing up near the beginning (dala) later when she’s showing it to her uncle Brian (he naturally hears [da] as in dada but it’s actually dall), while running with it, and toward the end as she’s bent over in front of her cousin Beth (visible only as a pair of legs, I’m afraid). The sounds [p] and [b] are both made by stopping all air flowing out of the mouth with your lips, allowing pressure to build up in your mouth and then opening your lips to release the pressure. Nora has figured out how to use the [p] sound at the beginning of a word (e.g. papa, (s)poon, paperetc.), but she currently conflates [b] with [d]. We’d say that [p] is a sound capable of conveying a distinction in meaning in Nora’s grammar of sounds; in other words, /p/ is a phoneme for Nora.
[b]’s status, on the other hand, is less clear. She is able to tell the difference between /d/ and /b/ words when we say them to her (pairs of words showing this minimal difference are: do/boo, Dee/bee, dad/bad, dig/big). We could put a stuffed bee and her friend Dee on either side of the living room and ask “where is the bee” and she’ll never accidentally go to Dee (she may never go to either but that’s a separate issue). She can clearly hear the difference — it is part of her grammar. However, she can not yet produce this difference. But where is the disconnect? Is she thinking of /b/, trying to say [b], but having it come out [d] meaning there’s some merely mechanical or articulatory disconnect? Or is there a speech production grammar that is distinct from her speech perception grammar (two distinct regions in her mind that encode these apparently isomorphic concepts separately)? Can she tell that the [d] sound she produces is not the same as the [b] sound she hears us make? Are there systematic differences between the [d] sound in balloon and the [d] sound in dada when she says them? These are the sorts of questions I work on, the sorts of questions I’m terribly interested in and what I mean when I tell you I’m a linguist.
As it happens, [b] and [d] are also quite similar to one another (both require that your vocal cords start slapping together very shortly after you release the pressure in your mouth or even *before* you release the air pressure) but I’ll leave that for another post.
Still here? Have I bored you away yet? Your reward is getting to watch a very happy little girl play with a ball that’s nearly as big as she is. Enjoy.
Nora’s Grandma McGowan turned [CLASSIFIED] years old yesterday and Nora’s Aunt Colleen threw a party at her house to celebrate. Nora had a ball (literally).
Saturday we went to visit Nora’s Grandpa (henceforth “Papa,” as Nora calls him) to help him move their new massive high tech flat LCD television set. Afterwards we were getting into the car and, as she climbed up onto the passenger side of the back seat, I jokingly asked Nora if she’d like to drive. Nora nodded very seriously, climbed back out of the car, closed the rear door, walked around to the driver’s side, made me open the door, climbed in, and took the wheel. Then? She started trying to honk the horn. Neither of these photos is staged and I am not making even a syllable of this up.
It’s impossible for us to believe, but Nora celebrated her 19 monthaversary today. To celebrate we all went out to dinner and Nora got to use a big girl cup with no sippy top. Our crummy camera missed the adorable moment of Nora doing “cheers” with her Mom. She lifted her cup, held it out toward Jen’s, called out ‘cheers!’ very clearly, clinked cups and then did this:
Okay, so it’s not jiff. It’s hippie-friendly organic peanut butter with flax seed oil. Either way, Nora loves it and I got to watch her figure out that you can use a mouthful of broccoli to work a mouthful of mushy peanut butter bread off the roof of your mouth (the alveolar ridge, don’t you know). This is Nora’s first-ever peanut butter sammich (don’t tell the allergen patrol!).
Note that the second half of her sandwich is peanut butter-side down on the table. :)
We’re not sure where Nora picked up this nasty habit of talking on the cell phone while tricycling, but we really have to have a talk with her about this. Doesn’t even look like her, right? That’s her defense.
Incidentally, Nora’s favorite toy store, Tree Town Toys, is one of the finalists for best toy store in Detroit.
Given what we mean when we say “old hat” it’s clear why Nora’s so excited in these pictures. Our friend Nancy works at Yale and recently showered Nora with a sweet haul of “future bulldog” swag like this awesome baseball cap and, I am not making this up, a (bpa free) nalgene sippy bottle.
Incidentally, Nora came over while I was posting this and spent some time kissing herself on my laptop screen and pointing at various objects in the pictures. When she saw the sippy cup full of milk she made Jen go with her to the kitchen and get her some. :)
Believe it or not, we just realized there are some more Boston pictures we meant to post. Adjacent to the “frog pond” on Boston Common is the tadpole playground. It has the weirdly soft playground pavement stuff that makes Nora fall down more than it probably cushions the falls and power-generating plastic slides but is otherwise great; Nora loved it, so we went back a few times.
On this particular day, the rain was really coming down.
