Tillie’s learning curve for french has arced upwards really quickly recently. All of a sudden, she is happy to chat in either language, and if you ask her a question in french, she answers in french, too. I suspect that this is mostly due to the fact that, as far as I can tell, she and her friends basically sing all day at crêche. So, when she comes home, she sings the new songs she’s learned for us. Her current favorite is mon hérisson (recorded surreptitiously while she was singing to herself in bed while “reading” one of her books):
For those whose knowledge of the french children’s music canon is about where ours was a few months ago, here is a more traditional rendition of the same song:
Tillie has really been singing a lot lately–whether she is drawing, playing with her babies, or not napping, there always seems to be a song in her these days. Here are a couple that her dad managed to get on the mic.
The first is a medley of several songs that share the alphabet/ baa baa black sheep/ twinkle twinkle melody. I hadn’t realized that there is so much shared melody between these sounds until T. pointed it out to me a while ago.
Next, she demonstrates the Boss affinity that she inherits from her mother, with her Thunder Road rendition:
We decided we should start recording Tilda’s vocabulary while we still can, so here is a short compilation of her most frequently used words:
Nana |na’na| noun.
1. Banana. I would like some banana, please.
2. Banana! (or other food, now!) I need to rub banana in my hair or else I will start screaming!
No |newwww| adjective.
1. used to indicate that something is quite the opposite of what is being specified. This is not right. Let me show you how to do it.
Dada |da-da’| Noun informal.
1. one’s father. Dada, will you spin me around, now?
This next one isn’t really a word per se, but here is a little call-and-response between Til and her mom.
T. turned six months old today. She’s (as have her parents) changed quite a bit in that time. Back then, all we knew about the thing in Sam’s belly that would be Tillie was that it sounded like this when you listened to its heartrate:
Today, she sounded more like this, when she immobilized me for the second day in a row by falling asleep on my lap after eating her lunch (this time I knew it would go like that so I had my microphone ready):
Good work, Tillie. To celebrate the occasion, we had a little photo-shoot this evening. The girl broke out of her afternoon daycare-cold-induced funk to smile for the camera.
