Help! My Vocabulary Has Been Taken Over By Toddler-Speak!
Facebook memories reminded me of a conversation I had last year at Grand Central Terminal while visiting New York City with my then-one-year-old daughter. We had some time to kill, so we walked to the upper level platform to see how many trains sat idle in the station. I passed a mother holding her toddler son.
“Are you counting choo-choos, too?” I asked her.
“Oh! We just said bye-bye to five different choo-choos!” she replied cheerfully.
A year later, my daughter flips between calling them trains and choo-choos. She has quirks with other words, too. For instance, she calls pacifiers “googoo-gagas,” thanks to Sesame Street‘s classic “A Baby’s Life” song:
And now my and my husband’s conversations are peppered with seriously asking the question, “Did you wash the googoo-gaga?”
This is what my life has come down to. Referring to trains as “choo-choos” and pacifiers as “googoo-gagas” with other grown adults.