From goo goo ga ga to Nah: My baby has a new favourite word

All of a sudden, “baby” feels like an outdated term. Babies are small and quiet and lie there sleeping. Or, more accurately, they’re small and loud and lie there screaming. By either interpretation, what we have is no longer a baby. This girl is big. She moves about. She toddles! She interacts with the objects around her, redecorating my office daily, forgoing outdated concepts such as “bookshelves” in lieu of a more bohemian floor-based system. Now, we’ve reached a new milestone. She speaks.

There were false alarms on the journey to the first words, as members of the family all tried to claim the bragging rights. We’ve heard most babies say “Dada” first, partly due to the ease of the words but with a folk-story spin that Mums talk about Dads while Dads don’t talk about Mums. Keen to offset this imbalance, the mum in this story composed a song with these lyrics: Mum, mum, mum. I’m your mum, mum. Mum, mum, mum, baby, I’m your mum. There were other fingers on the scale, too. In the Tiwi language, grandfather is “Awaw”, which is right in a baby’s strike zone and feels like an unfair advantage. We listened to stories about friends whose parents surely were waiting with this same anticipation, only for the baby to call out a pet’s name or, in one friend’s case, say “cheese”.

It’s all fun and games until they learn to talk.

Eventually, the first word arrived, a classically delivered parent’s name. I won’t say which one as I wouldn’t want to sound braggadocious. There’s a joke you have the good pleasure of hearing four thousand times as a parent that you spend the first year waiting for your child to talk and the rest of your life wishing they’d shut up. Forgive my harsh language but that’s complete patootie. I love every last bit of this phase. I have never been afraid of being corny, which is good because I am psychologically Iowa, but something about these little steps melts me into a little puddle.

She is learning to interpret her world through language. This is something I repeat to myself during the morning’s eight readings of my daughter’s favourite book Where’s My Turtle?. I know where the turtle is and she damn well knows where the turtle is. The turtle is (spoilers) behind the flap on the last page of the book. Same place the turtle was the other seven times we read the book this morning. There are other books, dozens of them, but they are left on the shelf because none of them dare to ask the all important question: where exactly is my turtle?

Every so often, a new word is added to the repertoire. With Mama and Dada out of the way (not in that order, of course, but that isn’t important at all and barely worth mentioning) a world of possibilities suddenly opened. Bronze went to “dog” (pronounced gog) and was quickly followed by the surprise entry, shoes. “Shoes” has become a word of choice to the point that, if I am sitting about and not wearing shoes, she will bring a pair to me and declare “shoes!” in increasingly forceful tones until I put them on. It took a while to comprehend exactly what was behind this insistence until we cracked the code. The baby now understood that, to go out, we had to put on our shoes. This wasn’t about the shoes themselves. This was a gentle instruction that dad should not be spending his weekend lying on the couch when there was a perfectly good park that the baby would like to visit. So, put on your shoes, and let’s get going.

Every single word feels precious. We repeat it back and forth, trying to coax her to say it again. It’s as if we’re trying to capture a raindrop in our hand, well aware that there’s a storm brewing over the horizon.

This week, a new word emerged. This one is a real game-changer for both the baby and her parents. The word is “Nahh”. Not a simple “no” but a drawn-out “nahh”, in the same annoying tone that her father tends to use. No idea where she’s picked it up from. This word needs no encouragement. She uses it with reckless abandon. “Nahh” has been deployed in response to announcements of bath time, a dish of spaghetti and meatballs, a back-up dish of chicken and vegetables, a back-up back-up dish of one of those squeeze bottles of pureed beef stroganoff or whatever they contain, and to the offer of any book that is not explicitly about the whereabouts of a turtle.

What is striking though, is that this, too, is precious. This is personality manifesting in all its quirks. You might not like every aspect of a personality but really, that’s what makes it a personality, particularly one that is slowly emerging from its cocoon. We don’t like all of it but we love all of it. Yes, it is frustrating at times, yes I am a sucker for even trying a back-up dinner, but that’s the whole game. These are the precious moments, these are the raindrops in the hand. The most beautiful things on this Earth are also a little annoying. Love don’t come easy. So, would I change a thing? Nahh.

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