Enzish Lessons

Time for an update on Enzo’s vocabulary. He hasn’t added a whole lot of words, but he is speaking with more confidence (and volume, I might add). The difficulty with Enzish (the Official Language of Enzo) is that, like Chinese, there are many words that sound very similar, and there are only subtle differences that distinguish one meaning from another.

You’ll notice that most words in Enzish begin with the letter ‘D’, most likely because it’s the easiest letter to pronounce. So, here’s the current list of words and meanings;

‘na-na’: ‘Give me that NOW or I’ll start screaming my head off’.
This word is now accompanied by a pointed finger, which is making life so much easier lately. Before, we had to guess what he wanted, and just hand him everything within his field of view until we got it right. Now, he can be more specific. Most often though, ‘na-na’ has to do with food items. As an aside, while ‘na-na’ seems to be directed towards individual items, knowing Enzo, I think perhaps the underlying message is not ‘give me that’ but more likely ‘give me everything’. Just a thought.

‘da-dul’: ‘Michael’
Very cute.

'ma-ma': 'Mama'.
Next to 'na-na', this could very well be his most often uttered word.

‘da-deeeee’: ‘Daddy’.
So happy now that we’ve separated me from the dog.

‘da-doh’: ‘Doggie’.
Enzo has started to recognize dogs on TV, in books and other non-obvious places.

‘ti-teee!’: ‘Kitty!’
He’s usually very excited to see the cats, and pounds on their backs as reward for venturing close to him. They love that. The…..um, pronunciation of this particular word is a source of constant amusement in our low-brow household.

‘uh-oh’: ‘Uh-oh’.
He’s getting a bit better about dropping stuff on the floor, most often because he’s too hungry all the time to waste food on the dog, but once in awhile he’ll clear his tray for her.

‘tthhhhbbhhbthhhb’: That’s the car noise. Whenever he’s playing with cars, sees a car in TV, in the newspaper, hears a car going by, whatever, he makes that noise. Methinks perhaps we have another car-obsessive child on our hands.

The exciting part of Enzo’s vocabulary is that just this morning he started to put words together. We were all avoiding getting up to start the day and lying in our bed. Michael got up and went into the hall to put his car down. Enzo watched him go out of sight, and said ‘Na-na da-dul’, meaning, ‘I want Michael’. Sal and I just looked at each other in disbelief.

Lastly, Enzo is also using some hand signals that Sal has taught him. He’ll put his hands over his face at ‘oh no’, and will put his palms up to ‘all gone’. He’ll do the touchdown signal once in awhile, but we have some time before that becomes important (not TOO much longer!).

Other than that, and the occasional screaming and angry sounds he makes when he doesn’t get his way, he’s a pretty *yawn* boring kid to be around. Just a warning; I’m clearing my cache of Enzo pics, so my apologies to dial-up users. Anyway, Happy Friday, and enjoy.



Crazy hair.



















No pictures, please.





With his girlfriend, Kyra.