Move over ma-ma, tractor coming

Almost daily, our 1-year-old son points to the living room display cabinet of toy tractors and relentlessly repeats “dack-der” with the buzzing frustration of a fall-time fly at the kitchen window. The inflection of the word -- rather his phonetic resemblance of “tractor” -- begs me to break Daddy’s rules and unlock the cabinet of collectables for a stint of play. He remains disappointed.
“Da-da-da” was the first word our son said. “Dack-der” was the first word he meant. Thus, our second child continues the tradition to say farm words before “ma-ma” with intent.
Before she could speak sentences, our oldest child corrected adults who mistakenly thought pigs “oink’ed.” Their attempts to generate an “oink” in a repeat-after-me game prompted her to respond with a deep-throated grunt, like the pigs she had met in the hog barn. At 2-feet and a few inches tall, she stood correct, and the resulting adult laughter only encouraged more grunting.
The pig-grunting noise, though debatable as a word, is noted as one of our daughter’s first words in her baby book. Only ball doesn’t fit her first-words’ theme of farm animal sounds, which also includes moo and meow. I await the arrival of a niece or nephew, who will have exposure to both the city and farm life. I wonder what words the infant will have my sister-in-law scribe in its book.
My cousin’s son, also a farm kid, could call cattle at age 1. He bellowed an attempt at “here, bos” like his dad to summon the beef cows from the far point in the pasture. Our son can call the farm dog. He sings two syllables of only vowels and ends with a whoop to mimic a whistle. Among my first words was the phrase, “what’s that,” which likely initiated plenty of farm-related conversation about my surroundings.
Today, the toddler farm conversation focuses on tractor. Our son identifies them inside or out when he repeatedly says “dack-der” with as much enthusiasm as a time-challenged toddler who learns her birthday is tomorrow. He stops the broken dack-der record when we verbally share his enthusiasm about the farm vehicle. At this point, dack-der describes anything tractor-like, including combines. But big sis, the family’s Wite-Out applicator, urges him to say combine. To that, he says, “yah,” with the look of “you know what I meant.”

Link to Story