Nora’s second Christmas morning at our house started with this little dollhouse and a poor wooden doll family trapped in frog wrapping paper. Fortunately, Nora was kind enough to free them.
Our good friend Markus came over this morning for breakfast (day old french bread with eggs courtesy of the Masing family). After breakfast he helped Nora and me assemble the dollhouse Hans gave us yesterday (she can’t have it until Christmas, but I don’t see any reason she shouldn’t have the fun of helping us assemble). Assembly went perfectly smoothly and Nora was a real help. Here are some pictures.
thanks, Markus & Hans!
Nora and her cousin Kacie celebrated the end of summer by donning their inadvertently identical swimsuits (really, complete accident) and playing in Kacie’s fancy Finding Nemo lawn sprinkler.
Today is Nora’s 21 monthaversary! She’s been 7 months old 3 times now; she’s one month more than 4 times as old as a 5 month old; she’s 3 months shy of her second birthday; ≤ 30 months ago she started to exist; she has 16 years and 3 months before she has to move out (just checking to see if anyone reads this far into the sentence).
Happy Anniversary, Nora! We celebrated by going out for pancakes with Grandma & Papa. I also celebrated by designing a future playtime activity wherein we bake a bunch of cookies together, measure their circumferences, measure their diameters and then find the ratio of circumference:diameter for each cookie. I call it “baking a pi” (baking, experimentation, the scientific method, measurement, ratios, pi). But this geekiness is all in her future; today playtime looks like this:
We put an inflatable pool in the back yard to give Nora something to do when it’s too hot to go to the playground. The local raccoon population loves it too.
I believe this will be the first picture ever posted to Nora’s blog that is not a picture of Nora. This is because, as the title so subtly suggests, Nora took this picture. She enjoys being the star of her own web site but her real dream is to direct.
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.
* We’re also very fond of red lentils but that’s another post.
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.
Does anyone on Earth actually enjoy the game of baseball? Seriously? I absolutely don’t get it. Baseball combines all the excitement of watching your lawn grow with the wholesome family atmosphere of an opium den*. So… Nora, Jen and myself went on a tour of Fenway park which was um… green? Had a lot of seats? Is kind of old? I’m sure that if one cared a lick about this game the tour would be very special. It included dramatic moments like “this is where the players park their cars when they’re coming to a game *dramatic pause*”. *shrug*
Here’s a picture of Nora atop the “green monster.” It costs $160.00 (USD) to sit here and watch a game and you have to enter a lottery for the opportunity to pay that price. Have I mentioned that I absolutely don’t get baseball?
oh wait!! one exciting thing did happen while we were at Fenway. Our friend Tami bought Nora a new ducky.
*now that I’ve written this diatribe Nora is certain to grow up and be the world’s biggest baseball fan. She’ll end up owning a team or being the President of the United States or something like that.
