Sam’s Story: Week 107

I know I’ve gone on and on about this in recent weeks, but every week I’m amazed all over again at how quickly Sam’s language skills are growing. And I doubt it’s just her –from what I’ve read, most kids go through a linguistic blitzkrieg at this age. Sam continues to parrot words and sounds back at us, and she’ll even do the same with the television set or other people out in public. What’s amazing is her hit rate with using new words correctly. It’s not like she’s saying “purple monkey dishwasher” the first time she decides to ask for help working the latch on her new bath toy. She says “Daddy help boat, please,” which is a sentence that she has never, ever said nor even heard before. How did she do that? The human mind is so frickin’ cool.

Actually, she doesn’t say “Daddy help boat, please.” That may be what it sounds like in her head, but what comes out is actually closer to “Dadda hep bow pees.” She has also developed a habit of inserting a little “Hmmmm” sound to serve as a placeholder when she doesn’t know the word for something. This leads to requests like “Mama hmmmm pees” that send us into a long series of inquiries trying to figure out what she wants. Cup? Doll? Yogurt? Ball? Socialized medicine?

These little scraps of Samineese are a language that only Sam, Ger, and I seem to speak fluently, though I’ve noticed that other parents can sometimes make pretty good guesses, too. To test your own Samineese fluency, I’ve prepared this little game where you try to match “What is said” on the left with “What is meant” on the right. I’ve done the first one, “Doo” for you. Grab a black permanent marker and do the rest by just drawing directly on your computer moniter.

The answers are at the bottom of this news post. Don’t cheat!

In the meantime, here’s some pictures:

As you can see, Sam has learned to eat a banana by herself, though she has yet to learn how not to run while eating that banana so that it doesn’t break in half and falls to the floor and gets cat hair all over it. But furry bananas aside, with Sam’s illness long gone, her apetite has returned to make up for lost time. Saturday morning I watched in shocked fascination as she ate a whole banana, a fist full of Cheerios, a cup of creamed wheat (with raisins), half a cup of applesauce, and about six or eight grapes. She then wiped her mouth, looked me in the eye, and said “Yo-guh” like a thirsty cowboy demanding wiskey from the barkeep in a John Wayne movie. So I brought her about half a cup of yogurt and set it down quickly, lest I draw back a stump. When she was done, Sam set the spoon down, belched loudly, and asked to be let down so she could run around and burn all those calories off. Why didn’t anyone tell me kids ate this much?

And now the answers to the Samineese Challenge:

How did you do?