Lost in Translation

Joseph has a wide ranging vocabulary that consists of 5 words. We hear him say this stuff everyday, so we know what he is saying, but for the amateur, some translation is required.


Hi - pronounced High-eee


Bye Bye - pronounced Buh Bi


Bottle - pronounced Ba Ba


Ball - pronounced Bah


Uh-Oh - surprisingly, pronounced as you would expect.


At first, he would just say these things after we said them. Now, he says them in context with no prompting. He seems to know when we are leaving some place and starts waving and saying "Buh Bi". A new, friendly face is greeted with "Hi". The minute he lays eyes on his bottle, he gets all excited and says "Ba Ba" really enthusiastically (too bad for him, the weaning off the bottle process is about to be undertaken. Poor kid hates sippy cups - this ought to be fun for all involved). His latest word mastery has been Ball - he loves to go searching for his dinosaur ball in his toy basket. When he finds it, he very proudly declares "Bah".


The funniest thing he says has to be "Uh-oh". He uses it in exactly the right context. He drops his paci or a toy and you hear "Uh-oh". A few nights ago we put him in his crib and he was taking forever to settle down and actually go to sleep. He had been in there a good 30 minutes alternating between playing and fussing, when all of the sudden we heard him keep saying "uh-oh". We had no idea why he might be saying it because he really only says it in context. We didn't think about it again because 15 minutes later, he finally settled down and went to sleep. We discovered why he was saying "uh-oh" at 5:30 the next morning. He woke up, which he usually does, but after 5 minutes of fussing, hadn't settle back down like usual. Rich went in and both of his pacis were laying on the floor by his crib. We are pretty sure he threw his pacis out of his crib last night (he has a habit of throwing things when he is annoyed) and when he realized he was paci-less for the night, thought "uh-oh" was the appropriate response. I am sure if he had a more colorful vocabulary, it would have been more like "Oh - f*ck". Once the paci was back in his mouth, he immediately was back to sleep. Hopefully he learned that throwing stuff out of his crib is not such a smart idea....sort of cutting his nose off to spite his face.


Here is a video of him being prompted to say "Bye Bye". Rich didn't want me to post this because he said it's not a very good version of Joseph's "Bye Bye" and in his words, "we look like tools" because we just keep saying "Bye Bye" and "Hi" over and over again. He was over-ruled. Enjoy!