Vocabulary

The Salvateenies have been in pre-school for two and a half months and their vocabulary has been building steadily.

As you might imagine, Caroline is striding more quickly than her brothers and the gap between them is growing linguistically.  She started school speaking in nice, toddler sentences - there were subjects and verbs happening all over the place, often even agreeing with each other.  And then she started adding adjectives.  And then adverbs.  She LOVES adverbs.  "Mommy, can we draw with markers at the big table today?"  "This is really fun!"

Tomorrow came to mean "in the future" and Yesterday represents any time before right now.  She was playing with Boppy one day when Max brought in some magnets he'd brought them some months earlier from a trip to New York.  She saw the magnets and said, "You bought those for us.  You bought those for us yesterday."

She has also taken to giving me permission to do things for her.  Just a few days ago she and I were reading a book about a young girl starting ballet class.  She slyly turned to me and said, "You could buy me swippers for my dance class.  You could buy me swippers tomorrow."  There have been a lot of things she has pointed out that I "could" do for her.

Daniel and Max have not gotten quite so adventurous.  Max is having a wonderful time parroting still.  My favorite is when he tells me, "Good job, Mommy!"  When he's upset now, he will beg not to do something, pointing out that it can be done "tomorrow"  - "I no take bath! I take bath tomorrow!"

Daniel is branching out in the adjective department.  Max's favorite adjective for a while was "dewishus" - delicious!  Daniel made the jump to "Amazing!"

They also really like to take ownership of things.  Those are MY brothers.  You're MY mommy.  And, my personal favorite, every time they see a representation of the Golden Gate Bridge, they tell me, "Mommy! That's YOUR bridge!", which quickly morphed into "that's MY bridge!"  In fact, when we were pressed to come up with an outfit for International Day at school to represent our cultural heritage, I chose to dress the kids in variations of "The City" tshirts which they call their "bridge shirts".

They have such an affinity for the Bridge that when they noticed a photo on my computer, they piled onto my lap to see it.  We jumped onto Flickr and checked out everything we could find tagged "Golden Gate" and they would point at pictures to zoom in on, at which point they would ooh and ahh and, invariably, Max would say, "Your bridge, Mommy!", Caroline would say, "So pretty!", and Daniel would sum it up with a succinct, "Amaaaaaazing..."