Chatterbox

It occurs to me that it is hard to convey Eliana's talkativeness over the blog. She is a chatterbox. Ask anyone who has ridden in a car with her and they will tell you that she talks non-stop these days, pointing out everything she sees. On an average ride into town she will point out about 30 cars, trucks, and motorcycles and identify them as they go by. It sounds a lot like, "Car... car... car... truck! Motorcycle... red car! Yellow car! Truck... car... car... car..." and then she will start pointing out the houses she sees. Once she tires of that she will list off random letters she reads from signs. "B, T, R, M, W..." It's really quite confusing if you don't know what she's doing.

She is able to name all the letters and can identify almost all of them (with the exception of Q, I think). She is very good with the capital letters, but doesn't yet know many of the lower case letters, unless (like o) they are very similar to their capitals.

As for words, Ellie is working on prepositions and pairing adjectives with nouns. It's pretty cute to watch! The other day she climbed under a table then popped out the other side and announced, "I go THROUGH!" It was too cute. She uses correctly the words under, through, over, in, and on, and knows what you mean when you say above, with, beside, and around. Adjectives are fun because as she learns her colors she puts things together. She says things like, "Car! Red. Red car." frequently. It's as though we get to have a glimpse of her thought process as it happens. We've also heard pairings such as "windy day" "stinky feet" "silly kitty" and others.

Speaking of colors, Ellie has been getting much better at identifying colors correctly. This week she has the colors white, orange, green, and yellow down. When she got to choose a candy the other day she said she wanted an orange one and then fished around in the bucket until she got an orange one. She knows that her little potty is green and white but the big potty is just white. She is not good with red at all, other than recognizing red cars, including ours. She also has trouble with blue. (Ha ha! She is looking at a book next to me and I asked her what color something was. It was brown. She told me it was green. I gave her the prompt "It's b..." and she told me blue. So I gave her the prompt "br..." and she told me it was BRue! Silly girl!)

Eliana's sentences are getting longer as well. The other day I asked her to do something (I think I asked her to put something on the counter, but I don't remember exactly) and she told me, "I don't know to do that." I think that's been her longest sentence so far. Just a few minutes ago she was watching a bug on the bookshelf and it went between two books and disappeared. She asked me, "What happened to bug?" She has been playing with tenses for some time now, too, and that has been fun to watch. She is figuring out when to say "Play" versus "Playing" or "Played." And it occurs to me as I watch her struggle with "Go" and "Went" or "Fall" and "Fell" (She usually says "felled") that English really is a difficult language to master.

So that's sort of where Ellie is when it comes to talking. It's fun to see and difficult to document. And she never seems to want to chatter when I pull out the video camera to catch her in the act.