Uh-Oh!

Our B doesn't so much believe in learning words that are labels for things, like "milk" or "ball". You know, stuff that could be useful when she needs to tell me she wants something. She does say "mama" and "dada", but that's as close as she comes to labels.

Instead, she has learned exclamations and general purpose words. We've given her credit for "hi", (actually, "hi hi!") "bye bye", (actually "eye eye" with the occasional 'b') "hey", "yay", "mmmmm", (for yummy foods) and most recently, "uh-oh!"

I didn't mean to teach her these things, other than "hi" and "bye". What she's learned is the stuff that gets repeated to her over and over. We say, "Hey! There's the baby!" and stuff like that when she's walking around, so she learned, "Hey!"

We say "yay!" when she does something we've been trying to teach her—important stuff like putting her blocks in her incrediblock or how to kick her tiny pink soccer ball (which she can do, and with intention, thank you very much!) So she learned "yay!" and even says it at the right times.

"Mmmm" is obvious, really. When we try to "sell" her a food that she might or might not like, she always got the "mmm", so now she says it when she eats something yummy. It comes more often as an echo, but sometimes she does it on her own.

"Uh-oh!" is the funny one. She says it a lot, but she gets a lot of opportunities to say it. Hardly a moment passes where she doesn't drop something she wanted to carry around, or has to try a few times to make something work. She used to get really frustrated when she wanted to do something and couldn't, so I started saying, "Uh-oh!" and telling her it was okay. Now she does the "Uh-oh!" on her own, and moves on with things.

It's all hilarious, though. Between all her actual exclamations and the squeaking and clapping and things, it's like having a little sound effects machine in the house. A tiny little sound effects machine that you have to feed and change, that is.