Baby, Oh Baby!

Adik’s vocabulary is expanding by leaps and bounds. One day it’s a blank stare when I ask him if he’s doing a poop-job in his diaper, the next day he says clearly, “No?”

He’s also started labelling every picture of a girl/ lady/ old woman as “Kakak” (must be very flattering for the old woman). Once we were in the car on the way home and he said, “Kakak. Kakak.” We’re zooming along the LDP, and I was wondering where this mysterious “kakak” could be. (Actually, it made my hair stand on ends when I thought maybe he was seeing, um, “things” – worse still, “things” in my car!)

“Where’s kakak?” I asked him.

“There..?” he pointed to the billboard on the LDP. Phew!

He’s also quite insistent now when he wants to watch his new Little Einsteins DVD, repeating “tee-dee” for “CD” many – MANY – times. Then there are his regular words like “nana” for “banana” – as in Bananas in Pyjamas, not the kind you eat, “noh-ner” for “Donald” – one of the characters in Thomas and Friends, “ko-kok” for “keropok” – his favourite snack and “aa-woon” for “Harun”.

Interestingly, he has picked up that other cats are just “cat” whereas Harun is “aa-woon”. He’s still a little confused, though, that Thomas is what we call our other cat, yet that’s also the name of the train!

Lately, I have managed to differentiate between his calling our maid and saying ‘baby’. Now at this point I should tell you that our maid is called Bibik. So he’s learnt to say, “Bi-bi? Bi-bi?” And he also knows that very small people are called ‘baby’. Except that he has trouble saying bay-bee.

Instead, he says, “Bah-bee. Bah-bee.”

“No, no, Adik, it’s bayyy-bee. Say bayyy-bee.”

“Bah-bee. Bah-bee!” He’s so pleased with himself.

“Adik, that’s something else. And not a very polite thing to call someone, either. Come one, say bayyyy-bee. You can do it.” I’m not sure if I was encouraging him or discouraging him.

“Bah-bee!” he says with a grin on his face. He's probably just messing with my mind.

So far these conversations have gone on at home, which is ok. I just hope he doesn’t start pointing to cute little babies at the mall, or at restaurants, and calling them Porky.