Zuzu's language

We have a smart little chatterbox of a two-year-old. Here are some of the characteristics of her speech right now.

Zuzu's had a habit for a long time of not pronouncing the S at the beginning of words (as my sister pointed out, it's words where the S is followed by a consonant). She will say "twinkle twinkle little tar," ask to eat a "nack," and when frightened say that she's "cared."

When asked who-what-where-when-why questions, she will nod affirmatively and say "yep!" or "mm-hm!" repeatedly, which can get infuriating, actually. A typical conversation goes like this: "When?" "Yep!" "When?" "Yep!" "But WHEN did it happen?" "Mm-hm!"

However, she has just learned to ask the WHY question herself. And she asks it ... a lot. I realize that she is not quite sure what the question means, because she'll use it inappropriately ("Zuzu, do you want to ride your bike?" "Why?") and she'll use it even after I've already answered it, and she doesn't hold my responses to very high standards of coherence. Nevertheless, I've noticed that Daddy and I, as adults, are trained to answer the question when asked. It's like a knee-jerk reaction: when Zuzu says "why?" we come up with an answer, again and again and again. I met a mom at the park who also has a two-year-old daughter who has also started asking the why-question. "I LOVE it!" she said, beaming. She explained how it makes her think about the world and how she usually ends up at some universal truth. That part is accurate. At the tail end of asking and answering the why-question over and over, "because God made it that way," is usually the final thing I say.

Sometimes Daddy and I have to fight the impulse to give the why-question its logical answer, and to curtail the exchange with something along the lines of because-I-said-so. You know, to keep the upper hand in our parent-to-child relationship (ha. Ha ha).

This is one of our recent conversations verbatim. We were about to go out. I asked her, "which shoes are you going to wear?"
     "My tennis shoes," she said.
     "Then you need socks!"
     "Why?"
     "Cuz you can't wear tennis shoes without socks!"
     Silence.
     "Do you want to go get socks, or do you want to wear your orange flip flops instead?"
     "Um ... my pink ones!"
     "Your pink crocs?" (Another shoe option.)
     "My pink TENNIS SHOES!"
     "Then you need socks!"
     "Why?"

My favorite word that she says is flip-flops. She says "fip pops," and it just sounds so cute.

For a short time she doubled-up adjectives a lot. "My white white cup." "I'm a big big sister." That transitioned into using "very," but now she doubles "very" all the time. She uses "very" before verbs a lot, which I love. "I was very very singing." "He's very very crying!" (that one is often particularly apt.) And the other day she said, "I'm very very inside."

Right now she's thinking a lot about family relationships, and likes to make jokes by mislabeling people. Poor Bear often ends up as her sister, or as my mommy.

She is also experimenting with time phrases, usually opting for "last night" if it happened in the past, and "in two weeks" if it's happening in the future (I don't know why two weeks). She likes it when I ask her if she remembers something, and describe it to her. She practices doing the same thing, usually picking something that happened about ten seconds ago. "Member? Member mommy?"

It's so fun to have her around.