nephew update

[deird1]

1) According to Caleb, the baddie in Aladdin was VERY bad, because "he took Aladdin's hat away, and wouldn't give it back - so the genie gave it back at the end of the story". Forget suffocating princesses in giant hourglasses, and randomly turning into a snake - the thing that makes Jafar a true villain is apparently his hat stealing.

2) Nathan can stand up and walk a few steps!

3) As far as Josh is concerned, the past tense of "dig up" is "dig upped". As in "our back garden was dig upped".

4) Alex's favourite book to read at my house is still I Wish That I Had Duck Feet, several years after he could only request it by saying "Ducks!" and only sit still for two pages. He is, however, quite happy nowadays to alternate between Duck Feet and Where's Wally.

5) Michael has the cutest smile known to man.

6) The boys are loud, messy, impossible, and exhausting, but I still love having them all here. They're so great!



*takes a moment to rest before cleaning up the total bombsite that is the aftermath of a quiet day at home with the lads*

Comments

[me_llamo_nic]

Well, sure. That's how I knew River Song was trouble. Always stealing the Doctor's hats. Hell in high heels, that woman is.

*nods so vigorously that fez wobbles*

[velvetwhip]

Anyone who steals one of MY hats would need to go in to Witness Protection to escape my wrath.


Gabrielle

[mymatedave.livejournal.com]

That's sweet. One of my nieces, when talking about who was going on holiday would say "myself and Tom'sself and Dan'sself." Brilliant how they construct rules for language on the fly like that.

[glorious-pancake-morning.blogspot.com]

Re: 3) I love it! I'm reading Stephen Pinker's "The Stuff of Thought" at the moment, and there's a lot about how children learn the mysterious laws of English usage. Never mind this if you've already read it!

Have you heard of "wug tests"? They're a way of observing how children acquire rules of language formation. So you show a young child a picture of some little animal and tell them "This is a wug", then show them a picture of two of them - "Now what do we have? Two..." and the kid will create the plural form "wugs" (pronounced "wugZ"). You can do these kinds of experiment to see how children form plurals, conjugate verbs, and structure sentences. One of Pinker's experiements was to introduce a verb, "to moop", and show them that mooping was moving a sponge over a cloth to change its colour. So what do the kids say is being mooped - the sponge or the cloth?

[glorious-pancake-morning.blogspot.com]

Not to mention that adults constantly make "errors" of use when we're not concentrating - like conjugating an irregular verb in a regular way, just like Josh. Could be "digged up", could be "dig-upped". Knowing that most past tense verbs look this way, both of the above seem more natural than the "correct" option, don't you think?