Say What?

My friend, April from New Jersey, recently wrote a blog post about how she loves the fact that, although sometimes it takes a few minutes of hard thinking, she can pretty much understand everything her three-yr-old (who is two months younger than Amanda) says.  Even when he gets his context mixed up or says things in a way that doesn't normally make sense, she can figure it out.

I definitely have days when I am spot on with Amanda and we have wonderful, funny conversations about roller coasters and cows and whether or not she will be a Daddy when she grows up or if she will be tall enough to touch the ceiling (I still say no on the last two, she thinks she can beat the odds).  There are other days, however, when I don't have a clue what the hell she is saying.  I'll ask her to repeat herself, say it another way, show me, draw a picture, act it out like charades (no, just kidding there), anything to try to figure out what she's saying.  I either get it eventually or I give up and she is so annoyed with me.

The main reason we have this communication problem is because she says all her letters wrong.  She still says Nes instead of Yes, but for some reason can say Yep just fine, and drops a lot of letters at the beginning of words like H and C and S.  If it's a word she uses a lot you just know what it is, but if she's talking about something new I'm lost.  She probably needs to go to speech therapy to get it all worked out, and I've mentioned it to her a few times, but I'm going to wait a little and see if she figures it out for herself.  We're not in any hurry, especially since she's has two years of preschool left before she starts kindergarten, and there are a few words that she had fixed already and things she has gotten better about so it may just be a matter of time.

No matter how hard it is for me to understand her, it is equally that easy for Sarah to understand.  Still.  So this morning we're in the car driving to swimming and Amanda says something to Sarah.  To me it's like the teacher from the Peanuts is talking, "wha wha wha wha wha whaaaa".  But of course Sarah responds with, "yeah, that would be so awesome.  Or if...." and they go into this whole long conversation about whatever it was Amanda brought up in the first place.  It's almost like you're hearing one side of a phone conversation or a friend who's parent is talking to them in a foreign language but they are answering back in English.

I'll get it eventually, but it sure would be nice if it was sooner than later.