Bilingual

Before having children, one inevitably looks at the children of other people they way they would at animals in the zoo. With wonder. What an interesting and completely incomprehensible creature. And we like it like that. They are lovely to look at as long as you don't have to feed, clean, entertain or communicate with it. We marvel at its tricks. We wonder, briefly, why it behaves in certain ways, and what it means when it does this or that. We sometimes decide what type of parent/zoo keeper we might be, and often think critically of those we are observing. Then we wake up. We have children of our own, and over time, we understand. A lot. We get why the parents/zookeepers look the way they do. We get why some seem exasperated/exhausted/mis-matched/harried. But we also have another dawning understanding. We have come to speak the language. Suddenly these little ones are not just saying "Goo-goo" and throwing everything on the floor. They are speaking! That little guy over there is very clearly saying that he'd like some water please, and that it is so interesting to him that when he holds something over the edge of his carriage and opens his fingers, a few seconds later it makes a noise, and it's way down below! It's as if we've been initiated into the fraternal order of parents, and with membership comes understanding of a secret language. How is it that so many people speak this language, yet it never made sense before? And automatically you see that you cannot make non-members understand. Now you're on the other side of the fence. You have to tolerate people approaching your child and stating out loud for all to hear that he/she thinks you child is "doing something", "making poopies", "busy", "working on something", "insert any stupid way of saying 'going to the bathroom'", because he/she made some sort of sound of effort. What these people (non-members) don't seem to understand is that when you are beneath the age of one and do not yet walk/crawl/stand/basically move under your own control too well, everything you do is likely to require some form of noise of effort. If my daughter was "working on something" every time she made such a sound, she'd have been in the hospital long ago. Oh, and for the record, only one person out of many was ever right on this point. Anyhow, my point is that I have come to understand the language of baby, and am thrilled to be as close to fluent as an adult can be. While I get excited when she understands an English word I've used, I become equally as excited when she says something in baby, and I'm able to understand what she means. And it's just plain eerie when we're around other children and I hear someone else's child say something in baby and have it sound so very like my daughter! So next time you here a child say "Goo" or "Squeal!" or "Ca" or similar, be certain that it's not the child who cannot communicate with you, it is you who cannot communicate with the child.