English

How do you teach someone the word "dirty"?

It's a thought I had the other morning, getting the girls ready for daycare. I was telling Kayla about her dirty diaper for some reason, and Miss Mimic repeated the word back to me. "Dohty" I believe would be a good approximation of the vocalization. So we had a brief conversation about the differences between Dirty and Clean, and my day was that much better because, hey, I taught my daughter a new word. Didn't I?

I probably did, but it got me thinking about the enormity of this task, something I very nearly took for granted. A thing can be dirty in many ways, for example. What exactly constitutes "dirty"? The definition itself can vary from person to person: See, The Five Second Rule. And what if you haven't yet learned the word of the item, of which I'm trying to communicate the level of unclean? Does "dirty" refer to the object itself, or it's state of being? Linda made a Facebook post related to this the other day, trying to teach Jordan that the words "smallest" and "biggest" are fine, but "mediumest" is not. Why is that exactly? At some point a linguist has probably written a thesis on this very subject.

Phonics lessons aside, things continue to truck right along in the Vogts household. We are about two weeks away from officially hitting two years old, a concept that seems to be somewhat understood, including Mommy and Daddy only recently (October 9? Well, that's still weeks and....oh, yeah). And then it's our anniversary, and then it's Halloween, and then it's Thanksgiving, and then it's Christmas...We really need another month in here somewhere to slow things down. Smarch has a nice ring to it.

We bought a new video camera that should be arriving any day now, because Daddy likes shiny toys our old video camera is somewhat cumbersome to use properly. Getting videos off the current tape model involves plugging the camera into it's docking station, plugging the docking station into a computer, importing the video from the tape to the computer using some kind of editing software, encoding it for upload to YouTube, etc etc. An afternoon's work; a block of time I used to throw around casually, but now is quite precious to me. The new model is not only HD, but allows for videos to be saved directly to a memory stick, which hopefully should allow us to provide the world with videos more easily, and more often. The girls of course are at the point where they are capable of doing things more interesting than rolling over and spitting up, and we realize we've been somewhat negligent in offering up video proof of their talents. Early New Years resolution: the YouTube Channel will once again be active, beginning with the girls second birthday party in a couple of weeks.