Tonight Heather went to the gym and Leta and I walked around outside (she’s still not quite walking on her own, so I hold her hands and she talks and walks very quickly) and then we watched about 8.2 minutes of Sesame Street. During Sesame Street, Leta gets pretty focused on the puppetry and the songs so I can usually watch her out the corner of my eye. Or check email and watch her out of the corner of my eye. I busted out the laptop and checked my email. Leta has been drawn more and more to whatever it is me and Heather are doing. Checking email is no exception. After losing interest in the television, she sqawked and crawled at lighting speed over to me indicating that now was one of the times she wanted to be close.
So I pulled up the Boohbah website and Leta climbed up on my lap and very delicately muted the volume on the laptop with one of her little dimpled fingers. She has done this many times and knows that when she hits the mute button on the laptop, the little green bars pop up and she says something in whatever language she is currently learning that may or may not sound like something evangelicals might warn others about involving the dark side. Kind of like a scientist after proving or disproving a theory. Except that she’s not quite intelligible.
While we were clicking around the Boohbah site, Leta was leaning on the laptop with her elbows, her hands splayed across the keys (clicking the odd “g” or “7” with her index fingers) and asking rhetorical questions in her languages, she suddenly stopped, sat back and said, “Booh… Bah!”
Just like the kids on the show say Booh… Bah! when somebody is dancing or they want the creatures to dance or fly away or get back in the pods. She is imitating something that she hasn’t seen in awhile, and has made an association from the website to the TV. She’s got a bunch of these already, but this one was pretty big. I don’t know when the last time she saw Boohbah on TV or visited the website. Either way, the display of mental prowess was fantastic.
I know that billions of kids have learned to speak and to make associations. But when yours does, it’s more cool than even the mere thought of dual dual core processors or Nicole Kidman naked. It’s cooler than the internet. Watching Leta learn is cooler than the internet.
