Sunday, March 27, 2011

more funnies from children's talk

Helen is at the perfect age to provide most of the funny words and mispronunciations and misunderstandings in our house, although she's not the only one. This morning there was a great conversation between Helen and Lukas. At 8:00 I had to go to the airport to pick up Grace, a lady who will be staying in our guest flat for the next month, and since Elisabeth, Helen, and Lukas were all awake, I took them all with me. Helen was quite excited when I said I was going to the airport, and she wanted to go on an airplane as well. I said no, we're going to pick someone up. So then she asked if we were going to pick up Andrea (who was with us from September until the middle of December, and then from the middle of January until three weeks ago, and also visited last year in March/April, so that's three times we've picked her up at the airport), and after she got over the disappointment that we weren't, she asked if we were getting Evie (who stayed with us for three weeks in February), and then asked about Abuelita and Abuelito (my host parents from Costa Rica who were here for three weeks in October/November last year). Finally she said again, "HELEN go in airplane." When I asked her where she was going to go, she said, "The airplane go to the ore-port." She says "airplane" just fine, but says "ORE-port."

In the car then, Lukas tried to get her to say airport correctly.

Lukas: Say AIRport, Helen!
Helen: OREport!
L: Say air...
H: Air...
L: ...port.
H: ...port.
L: Airport.
H: Oreport.
L: The airplane...
H: The airplane...
L: ...goes to...
H: ...goes to..Ikea!

Lukas and I totally cracked up and Helen and Elisabeth joined in the laughing without having a clue why. She never did say airport.

Back at the house, chatting with Grace, Grace commented that one of the children had beautiful eyes, then another, and finally said, "You're all good-lookers!" Marie and Jacob were both still in bed, and Lukas said, with a very wise-sounding voice, "Wait 'till you meet my brother!" Jörn, Grace, and I of course all laughed at that, and then I tried to find out if Lukas meant "wait until you see how good-looking HE is," or if he meant "wait until you see him, then you'll know we're not ALL so good-looking." However, Lukas was really confused about why we were laughing, and I really only got as far as understanding that he had never heard the term "good-looker" before I realized that he was starting to feel like we were all laughing at him, so I dropped it. I never did find out what he had understood or exactly what he meant, but that didn't stop it being funny.

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