He fixed the car!

So, sometimes Laniña just babbles still, though increasingly it´s becoming clearer that some of what I can´t yet understand her saying is nevertheless an attempt to say something.

A couple of days ago, in the car, she said "wa wa wa wo coche" with definite emphasis on coche, meaning car, since that´s a word she has known for ages and knows well. So this was definitely some sort of sentence; I wondered what it meant...

She repeated it a few times, getting increasingly sure of what she was saying, while I became increasingly baffled - suddenly, just as she seemed about to give up, the penny dropped:

"OH, ha arreglado el coche" (What on earth? That mean´s He´s fixed the car)(!)
"¡SÍ, ha arreglado el coche!" Ana was delighted about this, and said it again a couple of times more, to make sure I got the point.

But really, where did that come from; was that really what she was saying? And it dawned upon me that, when she had first said it (it had taken me quite a while to catch on), we had in fact been passing by the garage, where the man had, indeed, fixed the car.

I guess I must have mentioned it, and somehow it just came back to her as we were passing! I chat over all sorts of random stuff when I´m with here, repeating myself a lot I guess, since my vocabularly would be more limited than that of a native speaker of Spanish. So it looks like my random chat is good - some of it sticks!

Fury!

Wow, interesting experience this afternoon - I was alone with Laniña; she was looking out the window and I was dictating notes into my mp3 player about an idea I had for another blog entry. Suddenly she began to shout at me, with great anger, "NO, PAPÁ STOP IT! STOP IT!"

I couldn´t really figure out what the problem was, until I began dictating again, only this time in Spanish - she suddenly calmed down.

This seemed bizarre at first, since she hears me speaking English all the time with her mother; but of course that´s what the problem was - her mother wasn´t there, Laniña thought I was speaking to her in English and it really freaked her out!

That´s probably good, right?

Pronunciation

Laniña's pronunciation has been getting clearer over the last weeks and months. Sometimes, though, that just makes her mistakes easier to spot. She quite frequently gets consonants or whole syllables mixed round - two examples came up yesterday:

in English, naming plastic fruit for her granny -
[apple] "apple"
[banana] "banana"
[pear] "a fruit" (!)
[lemon] "melon"

Granny thought that she thought the lemon really was a melon, but I think she just got the sounds mixed up.

Granny also gave her a new dressing gown, which I have been calling (hope it's right) in Spanish una bata. But Laniña says "tapa".

Also, she still leaves off the initial consonant to some words "wimming" for swimming, for example. Well, we´re not running for speech therapy yet, but just keep an eye on it maybe.

NO!

Ok, this has little to do with Spanish or bilingualism, but I guess that other parents of toddlers between 2-3 years old might find it interesting to note that my daughter's favourite phrase at the moment is to shout, preferably at the most inopportune moment, "NO! STOP IT! DON'T TOUCH IT!"

When she's being calmer and cuter she likes to introduce us as: "This is the Mummy one and this Daddy one."

Ho hum... the joys of parenthood.