A long overdue update

So Nico is now over 14 months old. He walks and kind of runs and is, in general, very difficult to keep up with.

More in the scope of this blog, though, he’s speaking.

Well, sort of. He definitely has words, but there are only a few. I’m not trying to oversell his abilities.

A couple months ago when I mentioned that he said “nana”– yes, it turns out that definitely means banana. He also uses it for other yellow things. He’s also added “agua” to his frequent vocabulary (I have never seen a child get so excited about water, but I’m not going to complain). He was really into saying “gato” for a while, but has since abandoned that. He does, however, bark. Sometimes it’s when he looks at a book and sees a picture of a dog (or other animal) and sometimes it’s out of the blue, but he knows we think it’s funny so he’ll keep it going for a while.

We haven’t had any new words for a month or two, but in the meantime, we’re reading and talking and listening to music. Speaking of music, I was very excited to find the album “4 amiguinhos” on emusic for $5. “4 amiguinhos” is performed by the band Loto, who come from my second host city of Alcobaça, Portugal. It’s a decent album, some of it gets repetitive, but some of the songs are grown-up-friendly as well. Previously I had thought I would have to spend $25 to get the album (including shipping) from cdgo.com in Portugal, so this was a pleasant surprise.

I was a little disappointed to find that some of the recent books from Milet Publishing appear to have Brazilian Portuguese rather than European– any Portuguese is better than none, but just like we’re not teaching Nico to call trucks “lorries” I’d rather not teach him to refer to an autocarro (bus) as an “ônibus.” Our other big issue is that there seems to be a shortage of board books in Portugal, which is problematic for a prolific teether like Nico (12, nearly 13 teeth), since I’d rather not spend $30 on a book only to have him destroy it. I guess I’ll have to keep looking, and in the meantime, I need to maintain my own Portuguese. Luckily I’ve found a site where I can watch Portuguese TV stations online, and my friend from my exchange is coming to visit in June– she’s Norwegian, but we often speak Portuguese together.

Anyway, so far, it’s just nice that Nico’s first few words have all been in Portuguese (though to hear my mother talk, every noise out of his mouth is a word, haha– oh, grandmothers).
Wow, this is what happens when I don’t blog for a while– it all comes out terribly rambly.

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