A Way With Words

Meg's vocabulary has been growing by leaps and bounds of late. Almost every day she surprises us by using a new word, or using a word in a new way, or putting words together into miniature sentences. Much of what she says now is intelligible, though she still has adorable bouts of babbling in her own private tongue. Then there are those times when she only thinks she's being intelligible. She's entered that challenging stage where she looks at you and utters something, expecting to be understood, and you just look back at her, completely mystified as to what she's getting at. "Sorry, Sweetie, Mommy doesn't understand what you're saying." You can only say that to a child so many times before she starts to get frustrated...

Anyway, here are a few of the terms Meg has recently conquered and added to her army of words. I'm dividing them into categories, just for fun. And I've tried to give a phonetic spelling of her pronunciation (so you can try to speak Megese for yourself), followed by the actual word.

The Confusing Words (These are the ones where the same pronunciation is used for more than one word and you just have to figure out what she means based on context clues.)
"Up": up
"Up": off
"Up": help
"House": house
"House": mouse
"Nana": her maternal grandmother and one of her favorite people
"Nana": banana, one of her favorite foods
"Coze": clothes
"Coze": close
"Coze": open

Animal Names
"See-wuh": seal
"Pooh": formerly used in reference to the beloved A. A. Milne character, this word now serves for any and all bears that Meg encounters
"Jee-jeh": giraffe
"Zhee-ah": zebra
"Chiten": chicken
"Hop-hop": bunny

Attire
"Jiiiinz": jeans
"Pats": pants
"Kots": socks
"Shooooooz": shoes

Astronomy (Our screen saver is a rotating series of amazing satellite photographs of various planets and such. After many months of asking "Wuh-sat?" about each picture in turn, Meg can now name the following bodies without prompting.)
"Joo-puh": Jupiter
"Marsh": Mars
"Errrt": Earth
"Meensh": Moon
"Schtaah": star

Sustenance
"Kuh-tee": cookie
"Kee-tay": cracker
"Kah-do": avocado
"Juuuuuuice": juice

Miscellany
"La-la": umbrella
"Huh-woah": hello
"Muh-muh": more (This one is tricky because it sounds almost exactly like "mama", but she sometimes helps us by using the sign for more.)
"Kuuuh-wuh-wuh": movie (This is the most bizarre one. We have no idea what word she thinks she is approximating, unless it's "computer", since we watch DVD's on our Mac. But every time she wants to watch something, this is what she says.)
"Die": what you do with a towel

(By the way, today leaves exactly one month till our big girl turns two years old!!! Yea, Meggie!)