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radegund0. TIME
The Oyster has got very into knowing our location in time, now, as well as space. "What time is it?" he asks, a few times a day, and, "What day is it?" He knows what happens on various different days, and he's fairly familiar with the seasons too (largely from his now-faded interest in farming). We haven't touched on months yet. The phrases "last week" and "last year" are general terms referring to any time in the past. I told him a story of all the events that will mark the passage of time between now and his forthcoming sibling's birth, and he's asked me to repeat it a few times.
1. THE FUTURE
We're living in it. (Clearly, I must forthwith make us matching silver jumpsuits with V-shaped bodices.) Oisín is definitively a twenty-first-century child. When he's a little older, I confidently expect to be quizzed in disbelieving tones about life in the Old Days, before there was a Web. (Will I remember, I wonder?)
I mentioned in the first part of this fractured Oyster Report that he's started asking for things to be looked up on the Internet for him. I posted a few more examples of this on Who Teaches Whom? last week.
On Tuesday, K took it a step further: she introduced him to YouTube.
"Why?" asked![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
kulfuldi - "Because he's nearly three, and it's important that he doesn't get left behind?"
No, I explained, nothing so abstract: it turns out, simply, that YouTube is chock-full of Thomas videos. Which the Oyster watched, back to back, for much of Wednesday. He won't let me watch them with him - banishes me from the room as soon as I've selected the chosen episode. It's his thing. There's something important about that, I feel.
I let him at it without restraint on Wednesday, because it was a New Discovery, but I wasn't prepared to go on that way (not least because I couldn't touch my computer all day...). Apart from anything else, he got into a state of high nerves about the whole thing, and dissolved in howls whenever (for instance) the screen-saver came on, or the episode he wanted wasn't loading properly. So on Thursday and Friday I rationed the YouTube fairly strictly. He seemed to be happier with that arrangement, on the whole, bar the odd whine. In the intervals between watching episodes, he reconstructed key scenes using his own track and trains. The Total Thomas Experience, it's been, this week.
(I must say, though, I did think it'd be a little while longer beforeniallm and I had to sit down and work out our position on the question of our children's Internet access...)
2. THE PAST
Unny making memory
Oisín appears to have quite a good memory. We've had conversations where it's been clear that he remembers his second birthday party last August, among other things. I sometimes wonder whether this is an inherited trait: I have substantial and detailed memories from my early childhood, and it's a thing that often gets mentioned about members of my father's family.
Anyway. Oisín has been putting this skill to use recently by memorising chunks of Thomas episodes from his DVDs. You hear him muttering them to himself all the time while he plays, and a few weeks ago he went through a phase of FIXATING on one episode for a day or two, asking for it over and over again, "because Unny doesn't know it". (To keep this in perspective, he doesn't recite entire episodes, but he has fairly substantial tracts of several of them off by heart.)
He's also learnt quite a few song lyrics, although not so overtly. He's not particularly interested in demonstrating this skill on cue (unlike his ma at his age, who was essentially a humanoid performing flea), but he comes out with them when he feels like it. A little while ago he surprised me: I heard him muttering something about "three little ducks went swimming one day, over the hills and far away" (or thereabouts), and then a rhyme with "quack, quack" and "came swimming back". It sounded familiar, but I couldn't place it. Then I remembered that it was a song from the CBeebies programme Something Special, which we'd seen together early in the spring (four or five months previously). Once.
Part of the reason this fascinates me is that it's exactly the sort of thing my mind does, too: absorbs scraps of lyrics here and there and then presents them to me at odd moments later on. His method of practising something he's learning is also very familiar to me. He repeats it as best he can, and puts in mumbles or mondegreens for the bits he's not sure of. For example (overheard in late June), "Boys and girls come out to play / The moon does shine as bright as day / Leave your supper and leave your sleep / And join your play[*mumble*] in the street / Come with a whoop, come with a call / And come [*pause*] or not at all / Up the ladder and down the wall / A hey-diddle-diddle, serve us all."
A more recent example is frankly unnerving. We were out in the garden about ten days ago, when Unny suddenly asked, out of the blue, "What's buddy?" He pronounced the word in an unmistakable working-class Dublin accent.
"What's the context?" I asked (as I often do to establish what he needs to know).
"Buddy," he repeated, "from when Unny was a little baby."
Now, here's the thing. The only people I can remember addressing Oisín as "buddy" were the carers at the crèche, which he last attended in January 2006, when he was a little less than half his current age. I got my breath back and said, "Buddy means friend."
He waited for more.
"Do you remember the people in your crèche saying buddy?"
He looked away and went all silent for a few moments, then ran off to be Gordon in the snow, or similar. I textedniallm, K, and my sister (the other adults who had spent time alone with Oisín in the previous week or so), to ask if the word "buddy" had come up in conversation. It hadn't.
Things past, and passing
Songs. We've moved into a different phase in our bedtime routine, and I'm no longer singing him to sleep. There was a discrete repertoire of night-time songs, which were not permitted to be sung during the day. They included "Dainty Davey", "Il était une bergère", "Bella ciao", "Molly na gCuach Ní Chuilleanáin", "Casadh an tsúgáin", "Down by the Sally Gardens", "Raglan Road", "Oft in the stilly night", "An raibh tú ar an gcarraig?" and "Let Erin remember". He has made it clear that he dislikes "Báidín Fheidhlimidh" since he was old enough to communicate his preference. These days the only bedtime song he requests is "Down by the Sally Gardens", usually preceded by "The pobble who has no toes" and "The owl and the pussy-cat".
Stories. For months, his constant request, day in, day out, was "tell-a-story-about-x". These were usually Mary-Sues featuring the Oyster (e.g.) going to visit Maisy and her friends on an array of vehicles. The frequency had definitely dropped by the time Bob the Builder came on the scene, around Easter. I think the impetus may now be directed into the scenarios he sets up with his train set, farm animals, Duplo, etc. - and he doesn't feature himself at all any more, as far as I can tell.
Pronunciations. So I don't forget them, I note from several months ago "having a nuggle on the dow-fa" (snuggle, sofa) and "gwiffness dwee" (Christmas tree). Much more recent gems are that game where one participant turns away and counts while the others hide, then searches for them, namely, "hide-in-the-sink"; the outdoor grilling device known as a "barb of cubes"; and the author of the Thomas canon, "de Webellent Dodwee Odwee".
Caesar, Napoleon, etc. There's much more use of the first person singular pronoun these days, so I think we're in the twilight phase of "Unny does", "Unny isn't", etc. And thus, a little sliver of cuteness passes from the face of the earth, to be found no more.
The Oyster has got very into knowing our location in time, now, as well as space. "What time is it?" he asks, a few times a day, and, "What day is it?" He knows what happens on various different days, and he's fairly familiar with the seasons too (largely from his now-faded interest in farming). We haven't touched on months yet. The phrases "last week" and "last year" are general terms referring to any time in the past. I told him a story of all the events that will mark the passage of time between now and his forthcoming sibling's birth, and he's asked me to repeat it a few times.
1. THE FUTURE
We're living in it. (Clearly, I must forthwith make us matching silver jumpsuits with V-shaped bodices.) Oisín is definitively a twenty-first-century child. When he's a little older, I confidently expect to be quizzed in disbelieving tones about life in the Old Days, before there was a Web. (Will I remember, I wonder?)
I mentioned in the first part of this fractured Oyster Report that he's started asking for things to be looked up on the Internet for him. I posted a few more examples of this on Who Teaches Whom? last week.
On Tuesday, K took it a step further: she introduced him to YouTube.
"Why?" asked
kulfuldi - "Because he's nearly three, and it's important that he doesn't get left behind?"No, I explained, nothing so abstract: it turns out, simply, that YouTube is chock-full of Thomas videos. Which the Oyster watched, back to back, for much of Wednesday. He won't let me watch them with him - banishes me from the room as soon as I've selected the chosen episode. It's his thing. There's something important about that, I feel.
I let him at it without restraint on Wednesday, because it was a New Discovery, but I wasn't prepared to go on that way (not least because I couldn't touch my computer all day...). Apart from anything else, he got into a state of high nerves about the whole thing, and dissolved in howls whenever (for instance) the screen-saver came on, or the episode he wanted wasn't loading properly. So on Thursday and Friday I rationed the YouTube fairly strictly. He seemed to be happier with that arrangement, on the whole, bar the odd whine. In the intervals between watching episodes, he reconstructed key scenes using his own track and trains. The Total Thomas Experience, it's been, this week.
(I must say, though, I did think it'd be a little while longer before
niallm and I had to sit down and work out our position on the question of our children's Internet access...)2. THE PAST
Unny making memory
Oisín appears to have quite a good memory. We've had conversations where it's been clear that he remembers his second birthday party last August, among other things. I sometimes wonder whether this is an inherited trait: I have substantial and detailed memories from my early childhood, and it's a thing that often gets mentioned about members of my father's family.
Anyway. Oisín has been putting this skill to use recently by memorising chunks of Thomas episodes from his DVDs. You hear him muttering them to himself all the time while he plays, and a few weeks ago he went through a phase of FIXATING on one episode for a day or two, asking for it over and over again, "because Unny doesn't know it". (To keep this in perspective, he doesn't recite entire episodes, but he has fairly substantial tracts of several of them off by heart.)
He's also learnt quite a few song lyrics, although not so overtly. He's not particularly interested in demonstrating this skill on cue (unlike his ma at his age, who was essentially a humanoid performing flea), but he comes out with them when he feels like it. A little while ago he surprised me: I heard him muttering something about "three little ducks went swimming one day, over the hills and far away" (or thereabouts), and then a rhyme with "quack, quack" and "came swimming back". It sounded familiar, but I couldn't place it. Then I remembered that it was a song from the CBeebies programme Something Special, which we'd seen together early in the spring (four or five months previously). Once.
Part of the reason this fascinates me is that it's exactly the sort of thing my mind does, too: absorbs scraps of lyrics here and there and then presents them to me at odd moments later on. His method of practising something he's learning is also very familiar to me. He repeats it as best he can, and puts in mumbles or mondegreens for the bits he's not sure of. For example (overheard in late June), "Boys and girls come out to play / The moon does shine as bright as day / Leave your supper and leave your sleep / And join your play[*mumble*] in the street / Come with a whoop, come with a call / And come [*pause*] or not at all / Up the ladder and down the wall / A hey-diddle-diddle, serve us all."
A more recent example is frankly unnerving. We were out in the garden about ten days ago, when Unny suddenly asked, out of the blue, "What's buddy?" He pronounced the word in an unmistakable working-class Dublin accent.
"What's the context?" I asked (as I often do to establish what he needs to know).
"Buddy," he repeated, "from when Unny was a little baby."
Now, here's the thing. The only people I can remember addressing Oisín as "buddy" were the carers at the crèche, which he last attended in January 2006, when he was a little less than half his current age. I got my breath back and said, "Buddy means friend."
He waited for more.
"Do you remember the people in your crèche saying buddy?"
He looked away and went all silent for a few moments, then ran off to be Gordon in the snow, or similar. I texted
niallm, K, and my sister (the other adults who had spent time alone with Oisín in the previous week or so), to ask if the word "buddy" had come up in conversation. It hadn't.Things past, and passing
Songs. We've moved into a different phase in our bedtime routine, and I'm no longer singing him to sleep. There was a discrete repertoire of night-time songs, which were not permitted to be sung during the day. They included "Dainty Davey", "Il était une bergère", "Bella ciao", "Molly na gCuach Ní Chuilleanáin", "Casadh an tsúgáin", "Down by the Sally Gardens", "Raglan Road", "Oft in the stilly night", "An raibh tú ar an gcarraig?" and "Let Erin remember". He has made it clear that he dislikes "Báidín Fheidhlimidh" since he was old enough to communicate his preference. These days the only bedtime song he requests is "Down by the Sally Gardens", usually preceded by "The pobble who has no toes" and "The owl and the pussy-cat".
Stories. For months, his constant request, day in, day out, was "tell-a-story-about-x". These were usually Mary-Sues featuring the Oyster (e.g.) going to visit Maisy and her friends on an array of vehicles. The frequency had definitely dropped by the time Bob the Builder came on the scene, around Easter. I think the impetus may now be directed into the scenarios he sets up with his train set, farm animals, Duplo, etc. - and he doesn't feature himself at all any more, as far as I can tell.
Pronunciations. So I don't forget them, I note from several months ago "having a nuggle on the dow-fa" (snuggle, sofa) and "gwiffness dwee" (Christmas tree). Much more recent gems are that game where one participant turns away and counts while the others hide, then searches for them, namely, "hide-in-the-sink"; the outdoor grilling device known as a "barb of cubes"; and the author of the Thomas canon, "de Webellent Dodwee Odwee".
Caesar, Napoleon, etc. There's much more use of the first person singular pronoun these days, so I think we're in the twilight phase of "Unny does", "Unny isn't", etc. And thus, a little sliver of cuteness passes from the face of the earth, to be found no more.