Now the thing about grandchildren is that they reignite memories of your own childhood and that of your kids.
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| "Play things" 2022 |
At which point I have to say that this is not one of those stories about the magic of our own.
He is of course special, but so are everyone else’s grandchildren. To that end I don’t post pictures of him or our kids on social media and I keep the personal stories of all of them in the house.
No, this is about the evolving use of language, and the words
he uses to express himself as he encounters new experiences and makes sense of
the world around him.
He is just a tad over three, will soon start pre school and stayed
over with his parents for the weekend.
It was early evening, and the light was fading fast, and as
you do, we turned on the lights which prompted him to say that this would “Smash
the dark away”.
I am no expert on the language used by children but this to
me seemed perfect and more than a little poetic.
Although I do have to say the use of “smash” was a little
violent, but then he spends chunks of his day charging about and bouncing off
me, Nonna, and his dad.
Happily, Bisnonna just gets a passing hug and more often than
not is asked to get him something more to eat.
Later while watching a carton of gyrating characters he repeated “Tumbling Tescos” which baffled me a bit but seemed to fit what was going on.
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| Illuminating the gloom, 2020 |
If I wanted to over egg the moment I might explore how growing up in the 1950s I might have commented on the same event, or a child a century earlier, when candles illuminated the gloom.
So that is it, less the start of a seminal work on how
children express themselves and more just a priceless moment I hope I will
remember.
Location; our house
Picture, Play things, 2022, and Illuminating the gloom, 2020 from the collection of Andrew Simpson
I knew a friends little boy once - quite long ago, who ingeniously solved the difficulty of using irregular past tenses like ‘bought’ or ´went’. He used ´did’ for everything eg. ‘I did buy’ or ´I did go’ ! It worked pretty much for all verbs.
ReplyDeleteWonderful! I have a friend whose grandson is a little older, and his imaginative and brilliant use of language is a joy! Do write it all down, you'll soon forget it otherwise as he moves onto new things!!
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