My Love You

As Amari's verbal skills continue to evolve I find myself torn between correcting/teaching and enjoying the really cute toddler-isms that spill from her mouth on a daily basis. It's kind of like when foreigners speak English and sometimes their semantic inversions capture the essence of what they mean better than grammatically correct sentences. 

A recent trend for Amari has been the emphatic use of the words "very" and "really," which are both interchangeable and most often used to modify gerunds. Too much grammar lingo? Okay. Here's a couple of examples:

"Dada, Dada," she'll say as she whizzes by me in the living room, "I'm very running." 

Sometimes she'll also use them with nouns, "That's really table," though that one has already fallen by the wayside.

The teaching conflict was more evident when Amari walked across the living room one-day, napless and delirious, climbed up onto the couch, placed her head on my lap and said, "My love you, Dada." Unsolicited and completely by surprise - it was pretty much the best thing ever. Since that day, I now say, "My love you, too, Amari," and I'm not sure I ever want to go back. 

Hunter, Amari, and Oscar at the Botanical Gardens