My Favorite Toys

Baby toys--who needs them when you have...

Koolaid bottles

egg separators

And pieces of paper. And who needs a paper shredder when you have a baby? Take that, identity thieves.

Okay, we don't really give her paper to play with for fear she'll really end up eating it, but it's probably her favorite thing to chew on. I have to be careful in church or she'll steal the program from me and eat it before I have a chance to look at it.

What I've been up to lately...

Recently I discovered that I have everything that I need to record my electric piano directly onto my computer. It's fun to play with, and doesn't sounds that bad, either. Here I've recorded the Theme from Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 2. It's a movie because I don't know how to do it another way. It's not really wonderful playing on my part--stage fright, I think--but it's fun to show what I've been dong. The long pauses are page turns.

A word on English spelling and pronunciation

Look--a post that's not about Lacey.

In college I majored in linguistics. Every once in a while, I have to vent about the misconceptions people have about English language and English grammar. My vent of the day: English spelling and pronunciation.

English spelling is NOT phonetic. It may be semi-phonetic, or wannabe phonetic, but the bottom line is that spelling of a word does not dictate its pronunciation. Dumb, I know, but that's how it is. In a perfect system, the pronunciation of a word would dictate its spelling, but, alas, we're stuck with what we got. The discrepancies between spelling and pronunciation stem from several sources. These are the ones that I've come across.

First, English pronunciation in general has changed since the language was codified in print after the invention of the printing press. All those silent gh's and g's and k's used to be pronounced. Also, when English was put into print, many of the words had different regional pronunciations, so printers opted for spellings of older pronunciations to be more consistent.

Second, English has borrowed heavily from other languages, including French, which is infamous for its silent letters.

Third, there are way more distinct sounds in English than we have letters to represent them. English has 15 distinct vowel sounds alone, to be represented by {a} {e} {i} {o} {u} and sometimes {y}. Doh!

Fourth, there is still wide regional variation in English pronunciation. No one region has a corner on "correct" pronunciation. The fact is, there is no "correct" pronunciation; there is only standard and non-standard. Bottom line, I can say it however the heck it comes naturally to me, regardless of how it is spelled, as long as I'm understood by the people that I need to be understood by. It is very useful to know and be able to use standard English pronunciation, but there's no law that says you have to use it or that it's more correct than other pronunciations.

My favorite illustration of the English spelling situation is this--

ghoti

How would you pronounce this word? Most people would say "goat-ee." However, it is a variant (made up) spelling of the word "fish." How can that be? Check it out:

enough
women
nation

English spelling is jacked. It's not gonna change, so you might as well get used to it.

First Book

Like a typical baby, Lacey can be surrounded by her toys, and only want whatever it is that I'm using at the moment. We were sitting together on the couch, Lacey in her little corner, me on the next cushion, Lacey surrounded by toys to play with, me reading a book, and all Lacey wanted was my book. No toy would do, even if I pretended I was playing with it first. So I got her a book to play with that she wouldn't destroy with her slobber. She was very interested in it, check it out:

But we all know the REAL purpose of board books:

I can do it myself!

Looking at the trend in my blog entries, you can maybe guess what it is my life revolves around. It's so much fun to watch that little monkey learn how to do things. She's just starting to want to grab things besides the toys that I shake in her face--things like my hair, my plate, my toast, the lid to the lotion tub, the spoon I feed her with, whatever she can get her hands on and stick in her mouth. I'm waiting for the day when she actually figures out that she can roll over to get to a different place and get her hands on so many different things. Another accomplishment of recent weeks is discovering how to get her binky into her mouth the right way. We were lucky enough to catch it on video--the end of the video is actually the camera shutting off because it ran out of batteries. It *only* took her two minutes to get it right!

Mostly this is for those few people who, like me, could sit and watch my baby all day. So don't expect an action-packed thriller

So Much to Do!

Lacey has, that is. She's been busy discovering new things and having new experiences, it's hard to keep up with it all! In the past month, she's eaten her first solids (she absolutely LOVES her rice cereal), she's learned how to roll over both ways (although she's still getting the hang of rolling from back to tummy, as you'll see if you watch the video), and she's learning how to use her hands, mostly to put things in her mouth. It takes me by surprise every time I find her in a position I didn't leave her in. She's such a little smarty pants, and it's so much fun to watch her discover the world!