From the mouth of babes

Somewhere amongst the baby babbles and goo's in the past few weeks, we think E-chan may have uttered his first word... there has been a lot of "da da da dad da da da"ing in the past week or so, and the other night after I'd changed E-chan and took him out to say good night, he looked straight at his dad and said "da da!". That was the first time we noticed the use of this monosyllabic word in context! There haven't been many repeat performances of "da da" being used to call for his dad, unfortunately, which either means a) he's calling out for his dad all the time and finds me boring, or b) it really just was a coincidence.

It seems common that baby's first word in many languages is often Dada - probably because of the ease with which the consonent "D" is uttered. But this also means that somewhere along the line, when the Indo European language was forming, some people decided that the first word babies utter should mean "father". At a BBQ the other day, a number of Mums were grumbling about how typical this was, and how it must have been men that instigated this word's meaning. However, I'm thinking it's possible that back then, in the days when godesses of fertility were worshipped, women probably had a lot of sexual power - only they knew who they had lain with and could say for sure who the father was. Therefore if a man was a decent type they wanted to stick around and help raise kiddy, they probably were flattering the man into thinking the baby's first word was referring to them. Which would have been quite smart, when you think about it. Just a postulation - no way of knowing for sure.

It seems that the next word is likely to be "mama maam ma" when E-chan is veryupset - yet to see that one though. Other possible words coming from E-chan's mouth include "Al Gore" this morning and "truffle" the other day, which I like to think indicate heightened environmental awareness (I did take him to see "An Inconvenient Truth" a few months back after all...), and a highly discerning palate (oh crap!) respectively.