What my nearly 2 year old nephew calls his family members and why, second nephew edition

my first post on my first nephew

his mom: mami

his dad: papi

The difference having an older sibling makes. Nephew M has been listening to his brother talk for most of his life, so his pronunciation is arguably better than his brother's was at that age. If you don't feel like clicking through to my previous post, Nephew C (the oldest) said mama and dada at this age. I know it's 1 letter off, but mami and papi are the correct words.

his brother (3 years): Cistian (he cannot pronounce Rs very well yet)

his maternal grandmother (my mom): mom (in a Spanish accent). This is because whenever my mom is around him, he's always hearing me, my siblings, and his parents call my mom Mom. It's hilarious. My family has more or less given up on getting the kids to call my mom anything other than Mom, plus their paternal grandparents have usurped the abuelito/abuelita titles (although they do add their first names to them).

his maternal grandfather (my dad): Lito, sometimes 'ito (see previous post for explanation)

his aunt (me): Tia Amy. Readers of my first post in this series will remember that my older nephew C called me Tia and called all his other aunts Otra Tia (other aunt) at this age. Karmatically, M will only ever call me by his other maternal aunt's name (my sister-in-law). This is because there is a Lovevery book where the child protagonist goes to the doctor and the nurse is called Nurse Amy, and also because Amy is easier for him to say than Michelle. He fully 100% means me. (In case you're wondering, my older nephew C will only call me Michelle these days, despite calling his other aunts Tia [name]. I like to think it is because of our bond.)

I have not heard M address or talk about his other aunts or any of his uncles (my brothers live out of state and are not around much), so no idea for those. Ditto for his other grandparents. He calls his cousins by name. He is so cute and smart like his brother, but with a mischievous streak. I love those kids.

What my nearly 2 year old nephew calls his family members and why

his mom: mama

his dad: dada

his brother (3 months): baby or bibi (beebee). You would think he'd call the baby bebe as he only speaks Spanish (and a handful of English words), but he only uses the English word because it's a family habit to say "baby" in English even if the entire sentence/conversation is in Spanish. No one knows why. We all do this all the time and he's heard us do it, hence, baby. I think bibi is him saying baby in affectionate baby talk about/to his brother, like his adult family members do.

his maternal grandmother (my mom): mom (in a Spanish accent). This is because whenever my mom is around him, he's always hearing me, my siblings, and his parents call my mom Mom. It's hilarious. My sister's trying to emphasize she's Abuelita, so he occasionally calls her 'ita (Lita) now (see why below). 

his maternal grandfather (my dad): 'ito (Lito). It was decided early on that my sister's (and my) parents would be abuelito/abuelita and my brother-in-law's parents would be abuelo/abuela to differentiate them, and my dad decided he wanted to be called Lito, which is of course the second half of Abuelito. It's an extra-affectionate way of saying grandpa. For some reason saying ita/ito is easier than saying Lito/Lita.

me (his aunt): tia (aunt in Spanish). Although now he is starting to glancingly say "tia 'shel" or another adorable mispronunciation of my name. I love it.

my older brother (his uncle): tio (uncle in Spanish). My sister is also trying to get him to say his aunts and uncles' names, so he occasionally attempts a "tio 'ado". 

my younger brother (his uncle): otro tio (other uncle). lmao. He left before our nephew could grasp Tio Jon.

my sister-in-law (his aunt): Tia Amy, clear as a bell. One of his favorite books has a nurse named Amy in it, so he got her name right away even though she and my brother were only here for the weekend.

his paternal grandmother: otra mom (other mom) to differentiate her from 'mom' (my mom). lmaooooo  My brother-in-law also calls his mom Mom.

his paternal grandfather: I am not sure! I have never heard him address his grandfather when I'm around. I will have to ask my sister.

his paternal aunts: otra tia to differentiate them from me. lmaooooooo. Yes I am very smug about this. He is starting to say "Tia [name]" though so it won't last long. He also initially called Amy "otra tia" until he learned her name.

his paternal uncles: one can only assume otro tio, although I've never heard him address them since he wasn't talking as much the last time we all hung out.

his cousins: I think the only one he really knows/remembers is his older cousin Daniel, whom my nephew addresses by name (Spanish pronunciation). If he talks to/about his little cousins (two of his aunts had babies before and after his brother was born), he probably calls them baby as well (or otro baby).

I love hanging out with my nephew. He is so smart and curious and inquisitive and is picking up language like gangbusters. He'll run around and say/yell the family member's moniker when he sees them or when he wants their attention. It's so cute. He'll also grab or point at stuff that belongs to/he associates with us and say our names. I love that little guy.

Book review: Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw

I decided to reread Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw after I saw that one of my friends was reading it on Instagram, and she has the same copy as me. This is a play, which was so successful that it was turned into a musical and then one of the favorite movies of my childhood, starring Audrey Hepburn. The play is called Pygmalion instead of My Fair Lady because it references the ancient Greek myth, about a sculptor named Pygmalion who carved a statue of his dream woman, which was brought to life by Aphrodite because she was moved he fell in love with the statue? IDK. Obligatory Amazon summary, because I am lazy:

Professor of phonetics Henry Higgins makes a bet that he can train a bedraggled Cockney flower girl, Eliza Doolittle, to pass for a duchess at an ambassador's garden party by teaching her to assume a veneer of gentility, the most important element of which, he believes, is impeccable speech. The play is a sharp lampoon of the rigid British class system of the day and a commentary on women's independence. 

The play is very much like My Fair Lady, except that there are no songs and Eliza marries Freddy at the end and they run a struggling flower shop. Freddy's family and Henry Higgins' mother play a greater role: a sort of parlor party? at Mrs. Higgins' house is where Eliza first tries out her high-class lady act and ends up just saying colorful/shocking language in a posh accent. In the movie, they go to Ascot so Audrey Hepburn can wear an (admittedly iconic) enormous hat and a tight dress. Also, the big to-do where Eliza has to prove her Lady-ness to Professor Higgins' former student is a garden party in the play and a ball in the movie. In the rambling epilogue, we also learn about Freddy's sister and how she learns socialism or something. I didn't really care.

I found the play very quick, despite its various ramblings about class (understandable) and H.G. Wells for some reason. Obviously besides the makeover aspect, my favorite thing about this play is the linguistics. I think My Fair Lady set me up to love linguistics, which I have found fascinating ever since I took a linguistics class in college. I will say that Henry Higgins is very classist and does not recognize that all British English dialects are valid and there is no right one that is 'correct'. This is a good book for English and linguistics students to read in order to see the racist attitudes behind diction classes and linguistic imperialism, etc. Despite all this, I did kind of find Eliza's Cockney rather hard to read, as it's written down phonetically. If you hate dialects in books, I would skip this.

At some point Henry Higgins calls himself and the Colonel "a couple of confirmed bachelors" and that makes the play make more sense. Of course two gay guys would give a girl a makeover and judge everything about her harshly and just kind of... not super care about her future. I feel like most straight men of that era would have been like, "well, if you can't figure out what to do with your life I'll have to marry you since I'm responsible for you." There's a whole song in My Fair Lady where Henry Higgins basically says he'd rather slit his throat than get married to a woman. That's gay proof for you.

I like this play but have decided to give it away since I just have way too many books and some of them have got to go. I would recommend this book if you like My Fair Lady or linguistics or late 19th/early 20th century English class dynamics, etc.

This has nothing to do with the book, but in My Fair Lady Freddy is played by an absolute dreamboat who I have just learned last night was actually young Jeremy Brett, the most iconic Sherlock Holmes!!!!! I was SHOOK.

The above image is the cover that my copy has, and it shows Eliza as a flower girl in the beginning of the book. It's ok. I think maybe the small woman floating above the title is Eliza as a Lady maybe? idk. The only bad Pygmalion covers are the ones who depict her as a flapper or some other anachronism, or who use a Klimt painting as the cover.

Score: 3.9 out of 5 stars
Read in: end of May
From: the thrift store
Format: paperback
Status: giving away

April-June 2017 books

The first book I read in April was Ella Minnow Pea: A progressively lipogrammatic epistolary fable by Mark Dunn. This is one of the most unique books I’ve ever read because as the book goes on, it keeps using words with fewer and fewer letters. It’s also a fable with a moral in it. In a fictitious? island off the coast of South Carolina, a charmingly retro town adores its statue of a hometown boy made good: the guy who invented the phrase “the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog”, which is mounted on his statue. When the letters begin to fall off the decaying statue, the superstitious (or enterprising?) town elders decide it is a message from beyond the grave that the entire island must give up using that letter from the alphabet. You can imagine what happens when more and more letters keep dropping from the statue, and the faster they fall, the more outrageous and rapacious the demands on the townspeople become. This book made me angry because I could see a clear parallel between the “devout” town elders, who really just wanted a reason to take others’ houses and property, and current events. Clever, creative, sweet and mirroring our times: highly recommended. 4/5

Ellen White’s World: A fascinating look at the times in which she lived is the third book from George R. Knight’s Ellen White series. It’s basically a sweeping overview of the nineteenth century’s religious and cultural aspects, with a few EGW quotes thrown in to tie it to the Adventist prophet and writer. I had to read this for a class and found this book interesting, but I thought Ellen White’s World should have included more on the prophet herself and not kept to such an insanely short page length. 3.9/5

Bee: The Princess of the Dwarfs by Anatole France is a classic old-fashioned fairytale about a princess and her cousin/betrothed who, as children, wander from home and get kidnapped by dwarves and nixies, respectively. It was a nice story but very short, and I felt like it could have been fleshed out more. The ending was also kind of meh because there wasn’t any sort of climactic battle; the kids end up being freed by the king of the dwarfs because he loves Honeybee. Yes, that’s her nickname; not sure why they didn’t just put Honeybee instead of Bee in the title. I mostly liked this anyway. This was a Nook ebook. 3.4/5

Another Nook ebook that I read was A Sicilian Romance by Ann Radcliffe, which was a Gothic Romance. Secret passageways and tunnels below a castle, possible ghosts, tons of chases, heroine is constantly fainting and needing to be rescued, several faked deaths, a corrupt abbot, a band of thieves, caves, forced marriages and true love. A fun trip. 3/5

I guess I was in the mood for Gothic novels since after that I read Carmilla by J. Sheridan Le Fanu. Carmilla, which has been adapted into a YouTube video series, is the OG lesbian vampire who preys on pretty young women, hilariously changing her name to another anagram as the decades pass (Marcilla etc.). As with most if not all classic vampire novels, it ends with the hunting and elimination of the vampire threat. Even going in with full knowledge of what friendships between girls were like in Victorian times, this was super gay. It ended pretty abruptly (I guess a lot of novels from this period do), but I liked it anyway; it was pretty funny. 3.5/5

Technically I finished this book in July but I mostly read it in June, so I’m going to include it in here anyway. Torn: Rescuing the Gospel from the Gays-v.s.-Christians Debate by Justin Lee is an excellent book about how we should view and treat gay Christians and gay people in general, and how our church should change its view of homosexuality and how it treats those in the LGBT+ spectrum if it wants to repair relationships rather than cause pain. This was excellent; highly recommended. I honestly feel like every Christian should read this regardless of their orientation and opinion. 4.9/5

Duolingo errors, part one

I use the Duolingo app for iPad and I love it a lot. In the video I made using the Educreations iPad app, I use some errors in quiz questions as a springboard for discussing Spanish and English, linguistics, grammar, definitions, dialects, vocabulary, and more.

The volume is a bit soft and gets muffled by rustling noises in parts, but this is the first time I've used Educreations and the first time recording a whiteboard video with it. Also, where it sounds like I said "betting" or "bet", I'm actually saying "vetting" or "vet". (Ironically, Mexican Spanish confuses/interchanges the B and V sounds. I've lost my accent decades ago but I have a very soft voice.) My next video will be better.

https://www.educreations.com/lesson/view/duolingo-errors-1/31552682/?s=PA4q7z&ref=app