Once a week my mother-in-law babysits another toddler. She’s only two weeks younger than Doyle, but unlike him (who is just starting to talk in a way we can understand), she talks in complete sentences like a five year-old. So, this week after work, I went over to the in-laws, and sat down with her and Doyle. Doyle was busy playing with trains, so she broke out a deck of picture flash cards, and began identifying them.
After a minute or two, the challenge of the flash cards was not enough for her, so she began to answer like this, “Ant, that rhymes with pant,” Since she was going very quickly, she usually just picked a consonant to replace or put in front of the first letter, and ended up with things like, “Orange, that rhymes with porange,”
The game was going on very well, until we reached the card for “Duck, duck rhymes with…” and you can guess the consonant she chose in place of the “d.” I keep a completely expressionless face, not wishing to encourage this and we moved on through the rest of the deck. I felt like I had done a good job in not reacting.
A few hours later, while relating the story to her mother, my in-laws, and my spouse, as soon as I said the word “Duck,” she blurted out again, “Duck rhymes with…” Everyone else at the table burst out laughing. So, she repeated the word, much to everyone’s laughter, so she began chanting it. Doyle, now, recognizing this fun game, began chanting it as well. So we sat at the table as two toddlers joyously chanted f-bombs.
Doyle still doesn’t speak much, but at least he’s learning the important words.