Sadly, the trip is over and I have returned to the world of the real, back from Vegas and back from The Amazing Meeting 7. (Greets out to all the amazing folks I met down there!) Of course, that means not only are my skeptical batteries fully charged (if not my energy levels) but I’ve got a shopping list of new ideas and new topics to explore on this blog. I’ll have more to come in the next few weeks (paced out over time) and particularly a big exploration of a comment Penn Jillette made from the panel in regards to a question about “bringing youth into skepticism.”

But more on that in a later post.

Some of my best parenting-related material will no doubt come from the simple fact that we left The Girl with her grandparents and scooted on out of the country for five days. She’s not quite two, as you may already know, and only vaguely understood the fact that we were leaving.

However, I prefer not to think of it as “ditching the kid” for a trip to Las Vegas, but rather as an opportunity to contribute to my child’s independence. And as coincidental as it likely is, and back for less than twenty-four hours, I’ve already noted a curious change in her. Let me start this way: I write another blog, a personal blog, a collection of words and thoughts about my other hobbies — running, writing, gardening — and frustrations. I also have a very different audience, specifically relatives and personal friends, who read that blog. And in a post geared at the grandparents (mostly) and just idly marking some of The Girl’s neat-o milestones for later reference, I wrote out something of a smallish collection of anecdotal observations about her little behaviors. It’s a parenting thing. But just a few days ago, one day before we left on a vacation without her, one of my points was this:

[She's] yet to understand the logic behind self-referencing pronouns. Words like “I” and “me” are not yet in [The Girl's] vocabulary. I’m not sure if this is normal, but whatever. She still gets her point across by directing ideas around other people; “side you” means I want to sit/stand/lay beside you. “self” means I’ll do it myself. And so on. You get the point.

Now, for whatever the reason, we got home last night and one of the first things I noticed was how much her speech had changed in those five days. And a big part of that was her use of the words “me” and “you” in — not just a few — but a lot of what she was saying. Is this because we left the country without her? Is this a milestone in independence? It’s early Monday morning and I just got back from vacation so I’m not in the mood to research it much more — though, of course, just of the top of my head I can come up with a couple other explanations for this change: (1) maybe the grandparents spoke differently with here and converse in a subtle way that we’re not doing, (2) maybe she was just on the verge of that and (as suddenly as she had begun walking, say) she just clicked into that mode and we missed the transition, or (3) perhaps her exposure to a swath of new and different people and (especially) new kids whilst on the show-off-our-granddaughter-tour with my in-laws was what she needed to pick up those extra words.

But it does strike me as very curious — though in a I’m-very-cautious-to-link-it kind of way — that the little exercise in independence we completed by leaving her alone for the better part of a week had, in fact and in observation, bridged the two states of her language. Not caused it. Don’t read me wrong. Bridged it as much as a mysterious black box of change wherein she emerged on the other side using self-referencing pronouns for the first time in her little life. Curious.

Coincidence? Yeah. Probably. But I’m okay with that, too.