Speakin' Good

I'm a big of a "talker"....wait what?!! No, surely, I'm making that up. You never would have guessed that. Err...right.

Anyway--I talk to LM all day long. We talk about what we're doing, what we're doing next, silly talk, running commentaries on whatever and so on and so forth. I know that talking is important to language development, and paired with a few of our baby signs, it will hopefully help LM develop a strong whole language base.

It's always been a pet peeve of mine when I hear people talking to babies with poor grammar usage. It seems like around babies, people who are normally well-spoken adults begin using random tenses, leave out words and just use poor grammar in general. It really bothers me---especially since I see the bad habits children pick up when it comes to grammar when they come to school.

But, like all good parental intentions, I've been catching myself doing it. AAK!! NO!
Just the other day, I heard myself say "You so cute!". No No No...bad Mommy! Why is it so hard to talk that fun syrupy mom talk (occasionally) without lapsing into poor grammar?? It shouldn't be so hard. I'm not perfect with my grammar usage (especially with nearly five months of sleep deprivation in play) but I thought I'd be better about it. I thought I would retain the ability to speak in clear, grammatically correct sentences to my baby. Apparently not.

Will it really hurt him if I'm not the model speaker? Probably not. But, at what point does it become influential on your child? Repeated exposure, like anything, becomes a model for little ones. They are what they live/hear/eat/see/experience. I need to do the following---a)stop worrying about it and b) try a little harder to make sure I model the language I want him to emulate. If he hears the random misspeak...that's fine. But long term, I need to make sure my speech acts as a good model. Just as my interactions with TH will model how to handle annoying people who can't seem to grasp that you're tired and really could care less about the state of the dust on our shelves :-)

Perhaps it's just a pet peeve of mine. Perhaps it's the teacher in me. But, I never thought it would be me dropping these "badder" sentences.