Hey Babe, What Would You Say?

My friend Christine, the world traveler, is moving to Prague. It's all for the best really, the people at the post office never knew where Slovakia was when I was trying to mail her packages.
Perhaps, along with her latest teaching certificate, she'll learn Czechoslovakian, to go with the other languages she's proficient in, including Spanish and Japanese. I envy her ability to learn foreign languages. After many years of high school and college French, and despite having French Canadian-speaking relatives, all the French I can muster is asking Monsieur Jean Claude if he'd like to have lunch with me, which I learned off a record in junior high school. And if he says yes, well what then?
Recently though, I have become fluent in "toddler." My older son spoke very clearly from the get go, but his younger brother is more cryptic in his vocabulary.
The other morning he greeted me with "Dee, dee off." I speedily translated this to mean, "Good morning, mommy, my diaper is falling off, please change me quickly."
"Puppy sweep," doesn't mean that the dog is doing domestic chores but that his stuffed dog is lying on the floor somewhere covered with a dishtowel "blanket." Said puppy is "sleeping."
Just this afternoon we were outside and he demanded, "foo ah." This one was pretty tricky and I was baffled until C translated: "mommy, he wants you to take his shoes off." And that's exactly what he wanted. As soon as he was rid of his sandals he climbed into the wading pool with a tennis racket and started hitting balls. I think what threw me was the request itself. Here is a child who, Houdini-like, can get himself out of sneakers tied in double knots, why would he need my assistance to remove a pair of velcro sandals?
I can even speak toddler though I don't like to. As with any foreign language, it makes me uncomfortable to try my pronunciation at something that's not my native tongue.
The only problem with learning toddler is that there's a lot of different dialects. Just because I understand one toddler living half-way down dirt road in West Falmouth doesn't mean I'll understand another toddler, even one that lives in close proximity. It's a language that's always evolving.

song: Hey Babe, What Would You Say? • artist: Hurricane Smith