Nymphs and Leopards

Given that he is only two-and-a-bit, R is quite an articulate little beast, but he still often mis-analyses words or has trouble pronouncing them. For months, for instance, he has been demanding to put on his "dressing joan" over his pyjamas first thing in the morning. (A similar phenomenon led P to be convinced for some time that we had a "washing lion" in the garden for drying clothes).

Recently, however, I've started to think that maybe he's doing it on purpose. On Wednesday, for instance, he insisted that the seal we were looking at in a book had slippers rather than flippers, that I had presented him with a hot buttered trumpet to eat, and that his brother had attended the nursery nativity at Christmas dressed as a leopard.*

I suspect that this sudden streak of word-play is related to what his older brother has been doing at nursery, as they have been learning about rhymes. P has taken to rhyming like a duck to water, though he is perfectly happy to invent words where he can't think of a real one. Sadly, many of the words he invents do really exist, even if he has probably never come across them, which can be the cause of some embarrassment when he gets one of his periodic fits of rhyming in a public place. 'I know what rhymes with "muck", mummy! ...'



* Actually, there was a Gruffalo, but that's beside the point.