02 September 2023 - Adorable Children
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Earlier today, my brother sent me a video of my niece. She was running 
along with a stroller thing in the garden as his dogs were chasing 
her. She is laughing the whole time until she stops and sort of sounds 
like she is crying. Turns out she is so happy she cannot make a 
reasonable sound other than a cry. Then the one dog goes in for a lick  
attack and she is giggling away while trying to avoid the licking. The 
video ends at this point.

This is the sort of video which makes me a teary laughing mess. I am 
always glad of my brother sending this sort of silly video through. 
Precious moments which are all that much easier to record with phones 
while not recording every moment. 

She is a little speed demon who has now decided that walking might be 
quicker than crawling. Fair play to her! 

Seeing how babies grow and adapt is fascinating. In terms of language, 
we have something odd occuring. She makes 2 sounds which are 
consistant and make sense. The first is mamamamamam which means 
"hungry!" while the second is "dadadadad". This second one seems to 
mean "leave me alone, I was able to do that before you changed the 
scenario, spanner features". It is interesting as she has never heard 
someone refer to her mum as mama or something similar. As her mum is 
Finnish, we have been fairly good at saying the Finnish for mum, Aiti. 
There is a theory that mama and dada are first words as they are easy 
sounds to make. From what I have seen, I agree. I look forward to 
hearing this Finnglish girl develop her language skills. I feel sorry 
for her as they are so different but also glad she will be subjected 
to both languages. She speaks to her mummo (grandmother) every day via 
a video call and that is just in Finnish. Plans have already been made 
for her to spend a month or so in Finland over the summer holidays and 
so be immersed in Finnish. At least someone in the UK born part of the 
family will be able to speak Finnish to any great proficiency. My 
brother has been trying but struggling. He mostly learns grammar 
through learning rude phrases. Fair play but my poor sister in law 
having to hear such nonsense from him. 

Perhaps she hears more than we thought and hears mum. Perhaps it is 
just how brains develope and Finnish decided to ignore that stage. 
Perhaps there is overthinking going on when there should be acceptance 
of the adorable nature of it all. I probably side with the last one. 
She is adorable and I am glad she is in my life. Hopefully she is glad 
I am in her's. One day that is. I don't expect her to care about the 
weirdy beardy who appears every 2 or 3 months to play with her yet. 
She has time to warm up to stug animal noises yet. 
MOOOOooooooooooOOOOOO!