The boy is now comfortably over 3 years old. He has an ever increasing vocab that’s grown by the phrase “Big-boy Star Wars” this weekend and is now capable of rational argument.
What makes him seem a bit younger than he actually is is the use of the word “me”. He’ll still say, “me want to do that.”, “but me want to!”, “me no want you to wash my hair” and so on. The sentiment is there but we’ve let him get away with it for far too long so this weekend just gone we started breaking the habit.
The carrot on Saturday morning whilst Wifey was at work was a viewing of the rather lovely Astroboy film (which is one of his current favourites). “Me want to watch Astroboy” was however met with, “No, you have to say ‘I want to watch Astroboy.’ Try again in a couple of minutes and if you get it right first time, we can watch it.”
I’m under no illusion this will be a hard habit to break as he’s been doing it for over a year but eventually after about 20 minutes we did get the correct sentence first off with no prompting so Astroboy went on.
When it came to the request for a lollipop, he’d slipped back to the old habit and we started the process again. I was met with a world weary sigh as he said, “But me want to say ‘I'”. So there is progress of sorts.