Today, we dropped Alex off at daycare. His friend Alexa was there and was thrilled to see him. The drop-off routine was going as normal. Alex comes in, takes his coat off, and washes his hands.
Normally, I then ask Alex, “Say bye-bye to daddy!” He happily replies, “Bye-bye!” It’s a pretty painless and quick routine. But for some reason, this morning, he got a sad look and said, “No. I want to stay here with you.”
I knelt down next to him to see what was wrong. “Alex, I have to go to work,” I said. He continued looking at me sadly. But before I could say anything more, Alexa came over. In her two-year-old voice, she says to me, “It’s okay. You can go to work, and Alex will stay here.”
I thought that was nice of her. And I had an idea. I asked Alexa, “Will you play with Alex so he will be happy?”
“Yes!” she said.
Alex broke out in a big smile and they ran off together, laughing.
Second story: Tonight at dinner, I asked Alex what he had for lunch. He talked about graham crackers and fruit. So far so good. Then, he said, “Bear-day.”
“What?” I asked.
“Bear-day.”
I had no idea what he was saying. Then, he said, “Amarijoisyellowh.”
“What?” I asked again.
And then I understood what he said: “Amarillo is yellow.” (He pronounces amarillo as Amari-jo." One of the teachers in his room speaks Spanish, and I guess they’re on to colors now.
I pointed to something green and asked, “What’s that?”
“Bear-day,” he answered. Yup, bear-day was verde.
Molly & I figured out that he knew the Spanish words for yellow, blue, green, and red. He may know more words than that, but those are the only Spanish colors that the two of us know (thanks to a toy Alex got from his great-grandparents that said colors in English and Spanish!).
We could point to colors on his placemat and he’d correctly say the Spanish word. Then, he pointed to a brown elephant on the placemat and asked us, “What’s that?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know the word for brown.”
“That’s brown in Spanish.” he answered. Pretty clever, I think.
