Jackson, being no fan of NPR, likes to listen to music in the car. So I oblige him. Mostly I play requests, but sometimes I can't look at my phone right then or am bored of the same thing over and over, so he does get exposed to various things.

Recently he requested "a train song." I had no idea what he was talking about, but on further discussion, he really wanted a song about a train. Okay... um... I have 8 gigs of music on my phone, there must be a song about a train in there somewhere. I eventually thought of two: I thought I might have City of New Orleans by Arlo Guthrie, and I definitely had Casey Jones by the Dead. The latter seemed rather inappropriate for a toddler, so I looked for the former. It turns out I didn't have that version, but I did have a cover by Judy Collins, which I had never to my knowledge listened to before. Jackson loved it, asks for it all the time: "City of Moo Orleans!"

I just put the songs he frequently requests into a playlist for ease of finding them. Here it is, the tastes of a 21st century 2-year-old (almost) when exposed to his dad's out-of-date music collection.

If I Had A Hammer	Peter, Paul & Mary
Life Is A Highway	Rascal Flatts
City Of New Orleans	Judy Collins
Suddenly I See		KT Tunstall
Sweet Home Alabama	Lynyrd Skynyrd
Burning Down The House	Talking Heads
Puff The Magic Dragon	Peter, Paul & Mary
Down By the Bay		Raffi
If I Had $1000000	Barenaked Ladies

I'm not really sure what to make of that. He wasn't impressed by the Beatles. Today he heard and liked Hey There Delilah by the Plain White T's, but I don't know if it's going to make his standard rotation.

Anyone have a better idea for a train song?

Watching him learn to talk is my favorite part of parenthood. It's really quite entertaining. He is amazingly talkative and fluent for being 21 months old, but that just leads to amusing conversations like this from today:

J: See Grandpa, wanna see Grandpa.
K: He's traveling right now. He'll be back in a week.
J: Grandpa in Las Vegas, playing poker!

One of the things I keep track of is how long his sentences are. Most of his sentences are 3 or 4 words, with up to 5 being fairly common, the occasional 6, and rarely a 7. But in the last week and a half, he's had two eight word sentences:

J: I want to drive it all night long.

Now, that one might not count for two reasons. First, he actually said "wanna" instead of "want to", though he knows the two separate words so I think it counts. Second, though, that's actually a song lyric from Life is a Highway, which he loves and we were just listening to. So... yeah, nice memory, but not a real sentence. However, a couple days later he said:

J: You want to put it on the table.

Again with the "wanna", but a legitimate 8. "You" there refers to him, since he hasn't quite figured out pronouns. It's tricky: when we say "you" around him, we pretty much always mean him, and when I say something like, "Want me to pick it up?" "me" always refers to Daddy and not Jackson.

On the other hand, sometimes we correct him, and he definitely understands that something's not right about the whole thing, as evidenced by conversations like this:

J: You want to go outside!
D: I do?
*pause*
J: Jackson wants to go outside!

He's also starting overgeneralization, which I'd been expecting but hadn't seen yet. Actually, the same day as the song quote above, our lunch partner, a pediatrician, had asked if he'd been doing it yet. I said no, but that week I started noticing it.

Overgeneralization is when he figures out a grammatical rule, like to make something plural you should add an -s to the end, or -ed puts something in the past tense, but then applies it to words that are irregular. Last week he emitted:

J: The mans leaved!

What's interesting about that is that he had both "men" and "left" a couple of weeks ago, and replaced them with the incorrect "mans" and "leaved". What this means is that he used to have separate mental dictionary entries for "man" and "men", but now he's combined them into one entry and is applying the rule to make a plural. Eventually he'll update the entry to reflect that it's irregular and it'll all be good.

One thing I wished I knew where to find is the distribution of language acquisition among children. It's easy to find a good list of average development by age, where Jackson can do most of the three year old milestones and some of the four year old ones, so it's clear he's quite advanced for his age. What I don't know, though, is how unusual that is. Is language development high enough variance that it's not remarkable that he's so far ahead? Or is he some kind of linguistic super genius?

My guess is neither, that his ability is rare but not incredible. But I'd still like to know. I suppose I'd have to ask an actual scientist in the field, since that sort of thing is hard to google.

Me: Night night backyard birds, night night nocturnal animals, night night United States of America¹. Night night Barack Obama, night night our ever vanishing civil liberties.
Jackson: Night vanishing... vanish...
Katy: Civil liberties!
Jackson: Civil liberties. Liberties wake up liberties. Smash crash liberties!

He has a surprising deep understanding of politics for one so young.

¹: He has posters of backyard birds, nocturnal animals, and the united states in his room. They're part of the nightly night nights.

Jackson has recently acquired two word phrases. I think his first one was "fire truck", which could just have been a compound word except for his pronunciation was more distinct than his other two syllable words, with a noticeable gap between the two words. Soon after that he started putting together a whole bunch of them. What I find interesting is that they seem to have a kind of grammar to them, related to ours.

For instance, he'll say "car come" meaning "the car is coming", or "back hurt", or "more strawbah" (strawbah means strawberry), but he'll never say the opposite. So you never hear "hurt back" or "come car". I think this is because "hurt" for him is a verb -- he's saying his back hurts, and you would never say your hurts back.

So one theory could be that he has the pattern N V as a sentence, a noun followed by a verb. His V N sentences seem much more rare. He sometimes says "put it" and "put there", but never "put N" -- "put" is always followed by a pronoun. Still, pronouns function as nouns, so that counts as a case of V N. Note that put is obligatorily transitive: you have to follow it with an object and a location. He clearly gets that put takes a location ("there") and an object ("it"), and sometimes he'll repeat "put it there" though he seems not to say it on his own. It's kind of hard to tell, though, since his pronunciation isn't always very clear. Is "putih deh" "put it there", or just "put there" with some sloppy pronunciation?

His phrases do encompass all parts of speech. Along with N V and V N, he also has noun-particle, "pick up"; noun-adjective, "potato hot" or "train fast" -- though never the opposite, which means these are probably predicates, like "the train is fast", only without the verb; and one I don't know how to classify, "bye bye Grandma", since I have no idea what part of speech "bye bye" is. The bye byes are very funny because they almost always happen shortly after the subject has left earshot, so we hear them but the Grandma doesn't.

His parroting has also drastically increased. He's started mimicking longer words, mostly nouns, like Hidden Villa, "hivilla", or astronaut, "atohtot". Every day he mimics several new words, but mostly they don't stick. He'll repeat them if you ask him to, but won't generally emit them unsolicited. New permanent words are more rare, maybe more like one per day or slightly less.

Watching him learn language is really fun. More fun for me than his learning to walk, possibly because I have some linguistics training. And also because language is much harder than walking.

Going to Spain turned out to be very tiring, since Jackson didn't really sleep much, but otherwise fine. He adjusted very quickly to the time change, perhaps because he was so exhausted from the flight. Coming back was another story.

For starters, neither Katy or I were feeling our best. I had gotten food poisoning in Madrid, and spent a day in the bathroom at the hotel while Katy and Jackson went to Toledo. I was still somewhat recovering from that. Katy was not feeling well, and may have had a migraine. Jackson seemed ok.

The first flight was fine. We flew from Madrid to Frankfurt on SpanAir, just a two hour flight. It was slightly late, but was no problem. When we got to Frankfurt we were defeated by the lack of signage and had to ask for directions, but eventually found our gate. There was a little cafe next door, so we went to get a snack.

Jackson took a couple of bites of my food, then gagged, and barfed all over himself and me. Ew. We cleaned ourselves up as well as we could, then boarded the flight. A few minutes before takeoff, he barfed again, again on himself and my pants. Hm, I guess he's not feeling well either. Luckily we had a change of clothes for him; sadly, I was out of luck.

After takeoff, before the seatbelt sign went off, again with the barfing. I was spared this time. However, his "clean" outfit was now not, and the carseat was covered as well. More cleaning, and then we used a chux pad to line his seat so he was at least not sitting in vomit.

Then he promptly failed to sleep for the next eight hours. Katy was in full migraine unhappiness mode, so she was out, and I was on my own. Luckily I had two things going for me. First, we were in business class with three seats, so we could fence off a little section and let him play there, which he did for a while. Second, the flight attendants were very nice, and didn't mind when I took him to the kitchen area to run around. Plus there was a passenger who played peekaboo with Jackson for something like 15 minutes. Still, it was a very, very long flight.

I finally resorted to WallE just to get a little break. It's about the best movie imaginable to show with the sound off, since there's so little dialog anyway. He quite enjoyed it: "Truck! Truck!" We couldn't persuade him that WallE was actually a robot.

Anyway, we survived. Unfortunately, as if we needed more misfortune, Jackson adjusted quite poorly to the time change on the way home. Three days later he was still getting up at 3 in the morning, which made our adjustment hard. He's back to his happy little self now, at least. Latest obsession: the neighbor's cat Frisky Doodles. "Doo! Doo! Soft!"

I think we'll wait a little while before any more transcontinental trips.

One of the great things about being a parent is the amazing sense of pride you get out of your spawn's accomplishments. Or at least I deeply enjoy it. When Jackson slowly mastered walking after days and weeks of struggling and practicing, or when he started talking, I felt a deep personal pride in the little guy. It's addictive, actually -- teaching him new words or skills is my favorite activity, not that he can do all that much yet at 14.5 months.

But when I think about it more, that strong pride seems somewhat bizarre. What am I proud of? His ability to do things that every healthy person can do. Everyone learns to walk, and everyone learns to talk. It doesn't even take much parenting -- kids will walk all on their own, and as long as they are around natural language users, they'll learn to talk whether you teach them or not. What's to be proud of? It's like being proud of your cat for napping in the sun.

For me, I think it has to do not with the specific accomplishment, but the effort. It's not the fact of his walking that makes me proud. It's that he worked and struggled hard at something and eventually succeeded. Walking is impressive because it's so hard. Not so hard as to be out of reach for anyone, but hard enough to require a lot of effort and persistence.

But then, to take a step back, why should I be proud of his putting in lots of effort and succeeding, when every other person takes a similar effort and succeeds as well? Of course, it doesn't really matter if there's a good reason to feel proud -- I do, and I enjoy it. I'll be proud when he rides a bicycle, or catches a ball, or writes his name for the first time. Which is good, and probably the point: if I enjoy that feeling, I'll encourage him to work at new tasks and skills, which will increase his fitness.

Darwin would be proud.

Jackson is learning new words at a rate of 3 or so per day that we notice -- maybe more that we don't hear, and certainly he's learning to understand many more words than he can produce.

For posterity, here's a list of the words he knows now. The actual words, not the sounds he produces.

( This is boring )

I'm sure I've missed some, and there are some words that we don't know what they are. He also has a hand sign for "all done".

Not bad for 14 months.

Jackson is 11 months old. He's been slowly picking up words for the last few weeks.

Actually, two months ago he started growling when he saw a bear (there's a big stuffed one at the library, and we have smaller stuffed bears). Now he growls at bears, deer, dogs, anything vaguely that shape and color. I don't know if that counts as a word though.

His actual words:

• Ba. This means "bottle" and is usually repeated insistently, though sometimes it just means "hey look, a bottle". One nice thing is that now we can ask, "do you want a bottle?" and if he does, we get back, "ba ba ba ba ba!" Communication is excellent.
  
• Ba. This means "ball". It's pronounced slightly differently than the above -- he's almost getting the l's out by swallowing the end of the syllable. Throwing a ball, then crawling after it to pick it up and throw it again, is a fine game.
  
• Ba. Again, pronounced slightly differently than the others. "Pacifier". This used to be "ka", I don't know why it changed. Kind of annoying, actually, since "ka" was so distinctive.
  
• Da or dada. Me! Yay.
  
• Bye bye. Usually accompanied by waving. Means what it sounds like, but sometimes he does it at kind of random times. Also, he's not great at saying goodbye when people are leaving, but is really excellent at saying it the moment the door closes behind them. I guess it's clear they're leaving if they've just left.
  
• Gama. This was new as of last night, and means "grandma". I don't know if this will last but it was super cute. Grandma was pleased. He got out all of "bye bye gama!" Awesome.
  
• Bih. This means bird and used to be a p sound with no vowel. I haven't heard this one for a few weeks despite trying to prompt it, so I don't know what happened to it.
  
• Go. Generally an instruction with pointing: take me there!
  
• Cah. The vowel is barely pronounced, it's almost just a k sound alone. It means car or anything carlike.
  

As you can see, most of his words start with "b". Actually, it seems like most of the important things in his life start with "b", oddly: ball, bottle, bath, baby, betelgeuse, etc.

He understands a lot more than that, of course. He knows his name, and various other people's names. You can say, "I hear someone coming!" and he'll turn and look at the doorway. If you say "yay!" he'll start clapping, and he will sometimes respond to "come here" if he feels like it. He also knows "night night" and "nap", though those aren't always well received.

It's fun watching him figure this stuff out. At least twice he's turned and uttered what seems to be a sentence to one of us with complete sincerity. We have no idea what he was trying to communicate, though, if anything.

I'm off to fabulous Park City, Utah, for the rest of the week. I'm going to be on my own with Jackson for at least tomorrow. Anyone know of anything fun to do in Park City for a 10-month-old and his dad?

Jackson has a cute little doggy. He really likes it, and its companion, a lilac sheep (odd, but cute). Actually, the lilac sheep came first, and he liked it so much that we got the dog from the same company, Just Jellycat. The dog's name is Shaggy. The sheep does not apparently have a name.



The best thing about these guys is that they're also books. Nice, soft books suitable for chewing on, very resistant to mutilation, and generally cute. The lilac sheep has a cute little poem, while the dog has a pretty inane story about playing fetch and taking a bath.



Anyway, the dog showed up recently, and Jackson played with it a bit. Then I decided to read it to him. There was fetching at the park, and jumping in the pond, and taking a bath. Then we got to this page (cue suspenseful music):



Can you read that? Let's take a closer look.



Get's! That's not even a grocer's apostrophe... that's just... not English! There's no situation in which "get's" is a word. Don't they have a spellchecker? Don't they proofread? I mean, there are only 80 words in the thing, and that's counting the two quacks from the duck. 80 is not so many that you can't actually check them all to make sure, that, I don't know, they're actually words in the language you're writing in?

Get's. Bah.