thinkin about a baby of my acquaintance & how when...

inkprincesse:

derinthescarletpescatarian:
chamomilegeode:
chamomilegeode:
thinkin about a baby of my acquaintance & how when her parents are hanging out & chatting, she’ll almost fully participate in the conversation–politely watching who’s talking, saying something approx the same length & tone of what her parents are saying, occasionally using a questioning cadence & looking at someone specific for an answer, laughing when they laugh–doing everything except actually using any recognizable language
this baby also once tipped me a granola bar at work. she’d been watching everyone in line very closely & when it was her parent’s turn, at exactly the right point in the transaction for a tip, she pickpocketed her mom’s granola bar & shoved it in the tip har
This baby has better social skills than me
My niece does this kind of thing too! Especially the conversational part. What’s interesting to me especially is, if you know a baby well enough, you start to realize that that babble is actually proto-language, and some of it is very recognizable. For example, the other day my parebts and I were talking about my boyfriend, (who she knows) and as soon as we said his name, Zoey turned to me and kind of shrugged her shoulders with her hands up and mumbled something that most people would find incomprehensible - but with the same cadence that we use when we hide her toys behind our backs and go “where’d it go?” She heard us say my boyfriend’s name, realuzed she hasn’t seen him in a while, and done her best to ask us where he was.
Sometimes she understands stuff I don’t expect her to understand, too, so we always use real, familiar words when we talk to her. When I told her “Oh, he doesn’t live here! He had to go home to his mommy,” I could SEE her understand. If she weren’t one and a half, she would have said, “oh, i see.” Instead, she put her shruggy hands down and said “oooooh,” then saw her ball in the corner and ran to go kick it.
Babies are soooooo much smarter than people give them credit for, it’s so cool to see how they interact with the world.

(via piratekingscooby)