Say hello to my little friend

Today when we were grocery shopping, Joey's attention was captured by a display of little Playmobil toys in a sealed foil packets, the girl series.  Particularly, he wanted the little girl dolly with the fluorescent red hair.  For some reason, Joey thought she looked like a cowboy. Only now, as I type this, do I realize that maybe the red hair reminded Joey of the character Jesse from Toy Story.  Anyway, he jabbered on and on about this little dolly. I figured he deserved a treat for the countless shopping trips he endures, so we pawed at all the little packets and, lucky us, we chose the right one.

We put together dolly at home, and then Joey decided she needed to accompany him to toddler group this morning.  And to his nap this afternoon.  And to the pool this evening.

On our way to the pool, Joey fell and scraped his knee, badly enough that he really didn't want to swim.  And so, to pass the time, I gave a voice to dolly.

Today on the expatriot message board, I noticed some genius advice.  A woman was posting about her child, who has a very good listening vocabulary in German, but refuses to try to speak. She was looking for advice on how to encourage her to be more brave about talking.  One parent suggested introducing a puppet who only speaks and understands German, so that if the child wants to play with the puppet, she needs to use her words.  She said she used this with her own child, who pretty soon addressed all of her toys in German.

As I've mentioned, I think that all of my children far exceed me in German: I'm the one who really needs a puppet.  But it did occur to me that this might be a good way to encourage Joey to talk a bit more and expand his vocabulary.

We actually used to do this all the time with Ella: her favorite thing in the world was when we would "speak" her stuffed turtle for her.  I guess, looking back, we didn't do this quiet as often with Alex: truthfully, Dennis and I had grown weary of "speaking" the animals.  But Alex loved chatting with his toys, too: it's funny how they would always switch eye contact from us to the toy when we did this with them.  They really got emotionally involved in those conversations.

So today I "spoke" a toy with Joey for the first time: he didn't understand what I was doing for a minute or so, but it didn't take long for him to catch on. Joey shook the dolly's hand in greeting (so Swiss! I think he picked this up from the child minders at my Integrations class.). And then he started telling the dolly all about how much is knee hurt. But soon the two of them moved on to singing songs and doing rhymes together: Two Little Blackbirds, This Little Piggy, Pattycake.  When I do those rhymes with Joey, he never speaks them along with me, but he sang every word of the songs along with his dolly.  

When Dolly asked Joey if he wanted to go swimming with her, Joey gravely informed her that she wasn't allowed in the pool because she couldn't take off her clothes.  But he was very excited to show her all around the playground: pretty soon he'd left me behind and helped Dolly down the slide, and gave her pushes around the merry-go-round, and went on the teeter-totter with her.  

It didn't take long for Ella and Alex to notice what we were up to, and they were both very eager to join in the conversation, but understood that this was Joey's turn to talk. 

Although Ella refrained from speaking with Dolly, she spent a lot of time telling Joey about what sort of house and furniture he might build for her, and how.

And while Alex, too, respected Joey's turn, as soon as we got home, he brought me a little lego minifig and asked me to speak it, please.

It's interesting how much Joey said to the little doll, and even more interesting how, when my herd of kids fell into a game of "Sharky, Sharky" (which, when I was a kid, was called "What Time is it, Mr. Fox?"), Joey was yelling, right along with the rest of the kids, "Sharky, Sharky, what time is it?"  Unprecedented.  And even more amazingly, he took his turn as the shark, standing alone at the end of the field, calling out, "Ummm...one o'clock!" and "Five o'clock!" (while holding up five fingers: nice, Joe!), and "Dinnertime!"

I was also amused that, when I tried to "speak" my friend Susannah's baby Christopher, Joey thought that was utterly ridiculous: "Mom! He can't talk! He a baby!"  Christopher was a little incredulous, too, and started crying.  He doesn't like it when people put words in his mouth.

While I was hanging with the small ones, Alex spotted a classmate from school, and he hailed her with an enthusiastic "Hoi!"  The two of them didn't talk nearly as much as Joey and Dolly, but they had a wonderful time playing with each other, communicating with giggles (hers) and physical comedy (Alex's).  He's such a joyful kid, and he'll do anything for a laugh. It was pretty adorable, watching them play, and when we drifted into our field game, Alex invited her to play and asked that we do our numbers in German for her sake ("except Joey doesn't have to, because he doesn't know the language of this land.")

Alex's friend was still a little shy when it was her turn to play shark, although Ella and nochElla did their best to encourage her, with my Ella assuring her "Du kannst auf Deutsch! Es ist OK!" and nochElla calling rapid-fire directions in Schwyzerdütch.  So maybe it's not surprising that she was reticent, Alex's good intentions aside. 


Still, it was so nice to see my kids playing with their little tribe of friends, plastic and real. That's the kind of stuff that makes "this land" feel like home.