Who's on third?

For two visits in a row now, I've been dinged by our Parents as Teachers parent educator (hereby known as Janet) for not working with the G-man on his pronouns. According to her, he should be making strides on using first-person words and learning about the second-person but well, he's not. And a lot of it is my fault. I really haven't put any time into it. Part of it is laziness and part of it is habit, which I guess is kind of laziness, too.

In the beginning, I actually made a conscious effort to use his name instead of "you/your." For one, I thought this would teach him his name. After all, I've been doing it with the dog for years and after eight of them, he seems to get the picture. But I continued because I realized we were using it a lot when he was being admonished, including the ever popular first name-middle name combo for emphasis (which one of his friends used today when she wanted his attention - too cute). I thought he should know that his name is a good thing, so I used it heavily in praising him and just telling him nice things about who he is.

Well, turns out that it's easy to keep referring to him in the third person, and I can't stop! As a result, he can't either. He's started to sneak in an occasional "I" but mostly, it's "G-man have that?" "That's G-man's." "G-man eating." You get the picture.

I think he even believes that "you" is another person. As in:

"No mommy talk to ladies."

"I'm not talking to ladies, I'm talking to you." (um, I'm lying)

"No mommy talk you. Mommy talk G-man."

But Janet, I promise that now Scott and I are both trying a little harder to refer to ourselves as I and me instead of just mommy and daddy and use pronouns with G-man. But if on your next visit he seems to think a weird kid named "you" is living with us, please just humor us for another month or so.