Bittersweet babbling

So Anna is almost 2, and her language skills seem to be growing by leaps and bounds every day. It's so exciting to see her learning new things and getting smarter and smarter all the time. I love that she can now pronounce "clock" as clearly as the rest of us and that she learned the difference between the words "Grandma" and "Grandpa" this last week. She says "whoop" when she drops something, which I'm sure she has heard from both her mom and her grandma. I also love that she yells "Trev!" and "Ash!" around the house, just like her mom and dad do, and that she recently learned to add the -ch sound onto the end of "ow!" I'm constantly in awe of our little daughter, pondering how her brain is processing things like consonant clusters and plural nouns and negotiating two-syllable words and multiple-word phrases.

But at the same time, I still experience intense joy and delight when she says "Domp!" (with a long 'o') for "don't" and when she says "bump" for "bum." (The bonus P seems to be a popular favorite around here.) Our already abundant love for her multiplies when she consistently refers to the computer as the "penloo" or when she pleads "thank you" (instead of "please") when she really wants something. So her own take on language delights me as well.

And lately I've been mourning the loss of the classic Anna words, like "bizee," that have disappeared from her vocabulary. "Bizee" was the word she said when she wanted her jacket zipped up. Now she says boring old "zip." Anna also used to say "jackee" for "jacket," which was supercute, but now it sounds more like "jackuh."

In addition, and much to my consternation, there are a couple phrases Anna says that I cannot decipher. For the life of me. Several random times throughout the day, she'll get my attention by saying "Mom. Mom. Mom." which is followed either by "gotch" or "uggadoo." She's incredibly consistent with the pronunciation of these words so I'm fairly confident that they mean something real, I just don't know what it is. She will also sit down somewhere, pat the space next to her, and say "pear." Is this some pared-down, slurred version of "sit up here"? Who knows what we've said to her to make her think "pear" makes sense.

For the time being, I guess I'll just have to content myself with trading the old adorablenesses for the new and patiently await the day when I finally decode the meaning of "gotch" and "uggadoo." Even though I miss "bizee" and the rest, there's still plently to enjoy, like when Anna says "change" (meaning "change my diaper") when she tries to say the name of her Aunt Jen or "Lala" when she points to a picture of her Aunt Natalie.

Isn't language development (and Anna) utterly amazing?