February 18, 2009

More made-up words....

Since we're all still sick here, nothing has been going on. Hannah is slowly improving, but I'm not so sure she actually has/had strep. She should be all better by now, but instead she has congestion and a cough. Me too. Chris too. But we don't have the fever she did, nor the sore throat. We've got aching joints. James has something too, but he's away on a business trip all week, so I'm not sure what his symptoms are.

I started this post last month, but never really did anything with it. Since I'm not in a creative mood (cough cough), I'll just post it now, in a somewhat unfinished form.

When Hannah was about five years old she had some great ideas to add to Webster's Dictionary (I bet you didn't know that she/me/we are distantly related to Noah Webster, at least according to family lore. Also, we're supposedly related to President Andrew Johnson, the first president to be impeached, who also ranks as one of the worst presidents ever. Note to self: dig up documentation!).

Hannah knew the words "today" and "tomorrow". But she thought of a couple more that are quite valuable. "Tomorning" was the first. It really cuts down on having to say "tomorrow morning". Or, if you want to put something off until tomorrow you can say "I'll do it to-later". We all use these words in our house today.

There are other words that morphed into our family's lexicon because of some of Hannah's early articulation difficulties. She was unable to make a "y" sound, so she substituted "l". When we see something that's adorable, we say, "cloot" instead of "cute". Also, if something is beautiful, we say, "blootyful". Of course, we were careful not to use these when she could hear us. But now that she can say them correctly, she thinks it's so funny to hear about what she did when she was little. I had forgotten one of her classic morphed/short-cut words until Kate used it a couple weeks ago: Walloo? It's a shortened form of "Where are you?". When playing hide-and-go-seek we'd hear her say, "Tatie, walloo? Are loo in here?"

All those speech therapy visits, all that time working on oral motor skills...I'm glad that we did it, but sometimes I miss the cuteness of Hannah's early speech.

1 comment:

Becca said...

I'm sorry to hear Hannah's been ill, but glad she's improving. "Tomorning" is a fabulous word! I don't know why it isn't in our dictionary already, but I plan on using it! :-)