MR DUCKS

Dentist selfie, including a Mexican duck.

Little Buddy* is starting to learn language and sounds. This, I knew, would happen. What really amazes me, observing such a process up close for the first time in living memory, is how he can make leaps of understanding. For example, it's been some time since I was "Dada" and Hayley was "Mama." (In fact, this one kind of passed us by because at first we weren't sure he wasn't just making the noises at random, and then by the time we were certain, he'd been doing it for a long while.) But it was pretty impressive when he started fixating on a picture of me and Hayley on our honeymoon, which sits on the shelf behind the sofa. He would reach toward it and go, "Dada!", having figure out it was me in the picture. For whatever reason it took him longer to figure out mama was in it, too. (On the other hand, when we read him Baby Feminists, he says "mama" when we get to the page with the Obamas!)

Or a couple weeks ago he was reading a book of Spanish words with Hayley, and eventually came back to the food page and made the "unnhh" noise he makes when he wants something toward the pictures of yogurt (el yogurt) and a banana (el plátano). It turned out he really did want some yogurt. Later, he did something similar to me with a set of little board books that have words on them, one of which is "yogurt." It's impressive in multiple ways-- like he knows the mushy snack he eats is yogurt, and he knows the cartoon in the book is of the same thing, and it occurs to him that this is a way to indicate he wants it!

Perhaps most of all this happens with ducks. He has a wide array of rubber ducks for bath time, and one of his first words was "duck" (though it just kind of sounds like "duh" when he says it). What he's very quickly also learned, however, is how to recognize a duck in a book. Probably it helps that one of the books we've read him regularly since month one is That's Not My Duck... so he's heard it a lot, but he plainly recognizes ducks as ducks in books where the duck isn't even mentioned in the text. I guess what impresses me here is that it means he already has an abstract idea of "duckness" in his head that he is able to match up with new images. I didn't know kids did this this early! His errors are usually understandable ones, too (such as mistaking geese or chickens for ducks).

Last week he had a fever, and I stayed home with him one day, and during a particularly fussy moment, I turned on Llama Llama on Netflix. In the episode "Spring Fever" (1x07), Llama Llama's grandparents show him that their duck had a baby duck, and as Llama tries to complete a series of errands, the ducks keep randomly popping up and getting in his way. Every time they did, Little Buddy† went, "Duck!" So even an animation is recognizable as the same thing he sees still images of.

I guess the real question is, if he saw an actual duck, would he recognize it as the thing he knows from cartoons and drawing and rubber toys!?

* I don't like using his name on a public blog, so I will try this out for now.

† Eh, maybe not.