A week alone for Dad and Anya

Lisa is away for a week on a research trip to Khabarovsk, and Anya and I are flying solo for the second time ever (Lisa took another short trip to Khabarovsk previously). While of course we both miss Lisa/Mommy, we are also enjoying spending some time together. For me it is a nice opportunity to catch up on some of the developments in Anya’s personality that I might otherwise have missed because I’m not with her during much of the day. I’m still not, by the way: she’s with her nanny Marina from 9am to 6pm while Lisa is gone.

But I do participate in all of the morning and evening routines that either Lisa or both of us would ordinarily do. I don’t usually feed her in the evening, for instance. I’m not saying it’s a pile of fun, but over the last few days it seems that Anya has been in particularly goofy moods while eating. It doesn’t do a lot for actually getting food into her chowhole with any frequency or speed, but she has a couple amusing habits. One of them is to look at a parent out of the very corner of her eye, then to catch you doing the same to her. Squeaks of pleasure usually follow. Another is pointing out various things going on with her feet under the tray – like socks falling off, or feet kicking, or toes poking out or hiding (“peekaboo!”).

Anya’s linguistic development has been particularly interesting lately. I just wrote about it to my Mom, and hopefully she’ll forgive me for repeating the gist of that email here:

Anya is now at that amazing and charming stage (other parents have told us about it) where she is starting to string words together. We went to the beach with a colleague on Monday, and she was busy pointing things out: “Daddy rock. Anya rock. Daddy Anya rock.” (We do, of course, rock, but that latter sentence was meant to indicate that I was giving her a rock.) Then she put it in a cup: “Anya rock cup.” The particular path of her development is interesting to me, in part because she’s doing it in two rather different languages.

(An aside: for some reason, the fact that Anya was learning Russian along with English very unexpectedly made me sad when I first started thinking about it. Why? I still don’t know, but I think there were two [equally foolish] thoughts. The first was that there is this side of Anya’s developing personality that I don’t really have access to. The second was that I felt sorry for her – for the confusion that comes from having to cope in two languages. Of course that is silly, because kids just pick this stuff up – it’s not a punishment or a struggle! But I just felt that way, that I was somehow letting her down. Anyway, I’m happy to report that I’m feeling better about it, particularly as I get to interact with her some in Russian and explore that part of her world.)

Back to the linguistics. I imagine that most kids must learn nouns first, and Anya is no exception. She has quite a meaty collection of them, and she is just now starting to figure out what I guess we’d call cases – i.e., subjects, objects, direct objects. Word order is still fluid, though, and she toys with it: "Daddy Anya kiss. Anya Daddy kiss." Both involved me kissing her. She likes to go through several iterations in one go. She still isn't really learning the little helper words, like prepositions, etc. But, more and more, verbs are entering the picture: “Anya baby PUT,” (accent very strongly on the last word!) when she puts her doll in her bed. And “Daddy SING” (more on that in a moment). And she is learning some phrases simply by imitation (“kiss it,” “lying down,” “socks on,” etc. – Lisa has reported on these), and she’s close to parsing the individual words.

What’s particularly interesting, though, is that she is going through this same process in Russian – which, despite its very distant shared roots with English in Indo-European, is a very different language. So (forgive the short linguistics primer), where English establishes what is acting upon what by word order (we know the subject, object, and verb in the sentence “I mail the letter” only by their location in the sentence), Russian does it primarily through grammatical inflection (like Latin and many other languages). That is, the nouns and verbs have special (morphemic) markers that denote what part of speech they are – and thus who is doing what to whom.

So, I'm interested to see if word order (English) or grammatical inflection (Russian) comes to Anya first. So far, the nod is slightly toward inflection. She appears to be learning the accusative case (“lyublyu papU” – Russian for “I love daddy,” with “daddy” in the accusative case and "love" conjugated in first person singular). (Yes, by the way, she really says that!) Unfortunately, I think she’s so far just mimicking Marina, and is not really thinking it through. I’m sure if she did, of course, she’d find it to be a very fine thing to say. Well, there's the language acquisition memo for the day...

As I put Anya asleep tonight, I was in for a nice surprise. She looked up at me and said, “Daddy. Sing.” Then she hummed a little song herself, and appeared to be saying the word “clouds.” It became clear to me that she was referring to a specific song that I actually sing to her frequently – Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now” (although I sing her the Pete Seeger version, with the added last stanza beginning, “daughter, daughter, don’t you know, you’re not the one to feel just so…” ). As most of you know, the song begins,

Rows and floes of angel hair
And ice cream castles in the air
And feather canyons everywhere
I looked at clouds that way

(Although for some reason I sing it “cotton candy everywhere…”)

What was remarkable was that Anya had picked up the “cloud” reference. Beyond that, it was of course fun to be asked to sing, and also to hear her version of singing, which was kind of tuneful in a strange baby sort of way.

Otherwise, for those who might be worried about our welfare without Lisa, I assure you that we're surviving! Although Anya needs to lay off the booze.