Harry's Blog

One of the most amazing things about having toddlers is watching their language skills develop. It's especially entertaining when you have twins because of course they eventually start to talk to each other.

That way when one of them learns a new word, the other can learn it from them pretty quickly. The downside is that they tend to reinforce each other's mistakes. Quite often one of the twins has nailed a word first time, only for repetition with their sibling to pull the word further and further away from the original.

For us the most entertaining aspect of two year old twins learning to talk right now is the compound nouns that they come up with. The children are creating their own words to describe the world around them based on their own experiences.

For example can you guess what dadda cheese is? It's a camera. Our son, thanks to my photography hobby, sees me as the source of cameras. And his grandparents have taught the twins to say cheese when they have their picture taken. So he will point at a camera in a magazine and describe it as a dadda cheese.

Bumpa wet is a watering can. Why? Because grandpa (bumpa) is a keen gardener. So most items to do with gardening are usually prefixed with bumpa. As is a boiled egg (bumpa's egg), for that is how grandpa has them.

Neenaw bits are pieces of an emergency services vehicle jigsaws. Bobbo bang is a hammer, as used by our children's hero Bob the Builder, or Bobbo as they know him.

To our daughter a sit down is a chair. A bumpa car is any vehicle sporting a Mercedes badge. A mummy car is a Ford - though we do keep telling them that our Focus C-Max is in fact daddy's car.

New compound nouns seem to be created every day. And in the last few weeks the twins have really began to talk to each other, so we're hearing bonkers new conversations every day. It's a very exciting and funny time.