Hello Popcorn

Hello light
Hello dark
Hello stairs
Hello walls
Hello railing
Hello ceiling
Hello kitty cats
Hello truck
Hello pieska (penis)
Hello bopka (bottom)

Only a partial list of the things Daniil greets every morning, unprompted, in his newly-acquired English. He says goodbye to all of these things too. And yesterday he uttered his first full sentence, apart from "I love you" (which he spontaneously said to me outside the American Embassy in Moscow). Here was yesterday's exchange.

Mama: What is it?
Danya: It's a truck.

Enough to make a Mama cry, as though her baby boy had taken his first unaided steps. The day before, Daniil would have answered "truck." Where in the world did he pick up the sentence construction? I love how language gets acquired through immersion, constant use, repetition. And I agree with Noam Chomsky that language also must be hard-wired at some level into each of our brains.

Listening to Daniil master rudimentary English is like opening suprise gift after gift. Tonight I wanted to get Daniil to bed early so that I could pay my bills. Oh, what a hard time we had with mighty testing of wills. He finally fell asleep, but woke up an hour later and unconsciously, blessedly, prompted an entire do-over so that we could get bedtime "right." And right we did, complete with his first popcorn, dancing to Emmy Lou Harris, and hilarious repartee about "poop," Daniil's current favorite word, along with "umbrella." Crossing our language divide in both Russian and English, we sat in a small pool of light at my kitchen table and cracked each other up. "Do you poop, popcorn?" Daniil asked as he devoured his bowl. "How silly!" I replied, in role as popcorn. "I don't poop. But Daniil does! And Mama poops too!" The conversation continued along this vein, typically of any 3 year old, as we introduced other characters into our poop investigation. This was the first instance, I think, of our playing off of one another's responses with humor--and as equals in some sense. Mama wasn't the teacher, Daniil wasn't the student: we were two human beings thoroughly enjoying one another's company. God, I can't wait until my child is fluent in English. What fun we'll have with words, and I can't wait to hear his ideas!

Relationship set to right, Daniil feel back to sleep with arms around my neck. I then crept out of bed to wring out some more time for myself. It's now 1:06AM. Time to shower and join my boy in rest. I'm sleep deprived these days, but taking this time to write is worth the trade off. Writing grounds me. And these blog entries are one of the few things I now get to do that are strictly for me. In other words, this blog serves multiple purposes, including restoring Mama to sanity.