The English language is super confusing

Just wanted to chronicle a few of the unintentionally hilarious moments of language acquisition happening around here of late.  :)  And because a post is always more interesting with photos, I'm also including a selection of my favorite recent Instagram pics of the wee boy!


We were reading through one of Joshua's illustrated Bibles, and we got to the story of Noah and the ark.  Joshua has been on an identification kick lately, asking me all the time "who is that?"  (Even when we're out at a store -- it's sweet how much faith he has in my omniscience!)  There's a picture of Noah working on the ark with another younger man, so Joshua asked me to identify the characters:

J: "Mama, who is that?"
Me: "That's Noah."
J: "And who is that?"
Me: "I think that's Noah's son."
J, nodding sagely: "Yes, no sun.  The sun is hiding.  I think it's behind the clouds.  But Mama," pointing again, more insistently, "who is that??"


I like blowing raspberries on Sophia's belly during playtime, because it always brings forth these cute little startled giggles.  She was lying down on a blanket one morning while Joshua was playing nearby, and he looked up when I blew my first raspberry.

J: "Oh!  Sophia laughs!"
Me: "Yes, I think she likes it when I give her raspberries!"
J: "Raspberry for Joshua?  Joshua eat raspberries??"
Me: "Oh, I'm sorry, honey, not that kind of raspberry..."

Anticipating a toddler meltdown (Joshua loves raspberries, and we didn't have any berries of any kind in the house), I was about to explain the difference when Joshua surprised me by reaching over to Sophia's belly, plucking an imaginary berry, and pretending to eat it with great glee.  So now,  the word "raspberries" means it's time to harvest the imaginary crop growing out of Sophia's belly!


Joshua has a small soft fabric ball that he's allowed to throw around indoors.  Usually, he plays nicely with it in the living room, but the other day, he followed me into the dining room area and threw the ball with great force at the table.  I immediately took the ball away and tried to capitalize on a teaching moment.

Me: "Joshua, we do not throw balls at the table.  See all the stuff on it that you could break?  You could hit the computer, you could hit the glass..."
J, formulating the new rules in his head: "We don't hit the table."
Me, excited: "That's right!"
J, who still confuses you and I: "You don't hit the table.  You can hit the computer, you can hit the glass, but not the table!!"


(This one I've shared on FB already, but it's too cute not to memorialize here!)

David and I were having a grown-up conversation in the living room, and Joshua desperately wanted to run fast with his papa.

J: "Papa, Papa, Papa -- no talking! No talking!"
Me: "Joshua, don't shout 'no talking.' What do you say when you want to get someone's attention?
J: "May I have no talking, please?"

The correct answer was "excuse me," but it's good to know our other lessons on basic manners are sinking in!

Bump Watch: 23 Weeks

Sometimes, I look at my profile in the mirror and am not sure how much I'm changing week to week. Then I look through these "bump watch" posts... I'm really glad we decided to start documenting the belly growth! I get so many comments from well-meaning women at work telling me I'm "so tiny" for being 5 months pregnant -- which is great, and I'm sure they mean to give me hope that I'll lose the baby weight quickly post-pregnancy, or something like that, but seriously, I just want to be told I look huge. :)

So anyways, here's the latest bump watch photo -- Christina at 23 weeks, 3 days!



And here's what BabyCenter.com had to say about our little guy's development this week:

Turn on the radio and sway to the music. With his sense of movement well developed by now, your baby can feel you dance. And now that he's more than 11 inches long and weighs just over a pound (about as much as a large mango), you may be able to see him squirm underneath your clothes. Blood vessels in his lungs are developing to prepare for breathing, and the sounds that your baby's increasingly keen ears pick up are preparing him for entry into the outside world. Loud noises that become familiar now — such as your dog barking or the roar of the vacuum cleaner — probably won't faze him when he hears them outside the womb.

And it's TRUE -- I did in fact see baby movement this week! I was sitting at my desk at work, drinking some ice-cold water (trying to get my 64-80 oz. of water per day). The baby tends to be more active after I drink cold water -- I think maybe he's responding to the feeling of cold water in my stomach? So he started kicking up a storm -- and with one particularly strong kick, I actually saw the top of my belly move! I immediately called David, and we marveled at our son's growing strength -- he's totally going to be a soccer star. :)

In other news, I had my monthly OB appointment yesterday afternoon. We got to meet another doctor in the practice, which is great, since any one of them might be the OB actually delivering our baby -- it all depends on when I go into labor and who's on call that day. I apparently am a textbook pregnant patient -- my weight gain is on track (finally up a net 10 pounds!), the baby's heartbeat is strong, my tests have all come back within normal limits, and my uterus is measuring just as it should be. We're so thankful for this "boring" pregnancy!

Oh, and we finally fixed our scanner, so I updated our 20-week ultrasound post with sonograms! [Here's a fun grammar/diction factoid that I didn't know before I was pregnant -- the "ultrasound" is the actual procedure using high-frequency sound waves to scan internal organs; the "sonogram" is the picture that results from the ultrasound procedure. The terms are colloquially used interchangeably, but I like precision in my word usage... So now you know!]

[And while we're talking pregnancy-related grammar/diction and precise word definitions... "Nauseous" technically means nausea-inducing, while "nauseated" means feeling sick. For instance, "I am nauseated because that smell is nauseous." I know this is totally a losing battle -- even dictionaries have started giving "affected with nausea" as the primary definition of "nauseous" -- so I've generally stopped "correcting" people, but I still firmly stick with the traditional definitions of these words. And thought I'd use this blog as a platform for raising "nauseous"/"nauseated" awareness. :)]

OK, OK, I'm done, I promise. Thanks for humoring this pregnant lady and her weird word usage hangups!

Our son: future soccer star and grammatical pedant... :)

Life's Little Joys

The art of being happy lies in the power of extracting happiness from common things.
-- Henry Ward Beecher (1813-1887)

The "common thing" that is bringing a smile to my face right now? Fixing the annoyingly ungrammatical "1 comments" bug in Blogger!

As I was contemplating starting a new blog, I was attracted to all the very pretty, very personalized blogs I was seeing out there. I started doing some research to see what (free) options were available, and came across one particular gem of a website, Blogger University, which compiled lots of simple and useful hacks and coding tweaks, designed for use on the Blogger template. I highly recommend this site, for those of you who want to make minor changes to the basic template, but have zero HTML/XML knowledge.

After learning how to customize the header with my own image, and figuring out how to add that cute little teddy bear favicon to the status bar, I was absently clicking through various other options, when I saw it. A fix to the one thing that had always, always bugged me about the basic Blogger template. "Fixing the '1 comments' bug in Blogger Beta."

Maybe it's just me and my OCD need for grammatical perfection, but it bothers me that the Blogger template is programmed to always list "n comments." This works just fine when you have zero comments, or two or more, but if you only have one comment posted, you're stuck with "1 comments."

Making the change was super easy. So easy, in fact, that I wonder why Blogger doesn't just do this automatically...

But I'm going to choose to extract happiness from the fact that I fixed the bug. Woohoo, no more cringe-inducing grammatical errors!