Are You Smarter Than A Two Year Old?
Posted on April 2nd, 2008 – 7:56 AMBy Kay Krhin
In my case, no.
Ben received an animal alphabet game from his Grandma W. He’s been playing with it pretty much non-stop (when he’s not playing with trains, that is). One afternoon he pressed a button and the voice said. “Find. The. Animal. That. Begins. With. ‘U’ “
He looked around and grabbed a mountain goat with horns. He looked at me and said. “eereeal” I thought, of course, it was toddler babble. I was thinking, well - he’ll see that it’s really “G” for goat or maybe “R” for ram. He set the animal down on the U and the game gave him the “correct!” music and said “U. Uriel. Begins. With. U.”
A wha? I thought I was pretty well versed on my animals at this stage in life. But this really got my goat. I had never heard of a Uriel - or is it an Uriel? I looked on the box sure enough there’s a mountain goat looking creature with the word Uriel beneath it. Now I wanted to know more about this obscure cloven hoofed animal. My old Webster’s was right there on the bookshelf. I leafed through, scanning down the page ”Okay U, U, UR, there it was. Uriel - one of four archangels in Hebrew tradition.” Decidedly not a goat. I scanned up the page - Ah, it’s actually urial, an upland wild sheep of southern and central Asia.
Of course, toy companies and books have always had a challenge with matching some letters to animals or objects. “U” is a tough one. Most often it is paired up with the fabled and fake Unicorn. Fisher Price was just keeping it real. Real obscure.
Come to think of it there are several letters that are hard to match up. “X” is a tough one. Ben has an alphabet book with the even more obscure Xenops - bird. Huh? And on top of that the Xenops is sailing in a Xebec. Now, “N” - you’d think would be easy. But that’s a hard one to match up too. There’s Narwhal - an Arctic whale, who by the way - could pass for the nonexistent fabled Unicorn. (also included in one of my favorite scenes from “Elf” - “Bye Buddy - Hope you find your dad!”) Digging further, there’s the large rat like rodent, Nutria which has been in the news lately. And of course how could I forget good old “N” standby, Newt.
How about any additional obscure animal alphabet pairings to share? Or how has your toddler outsmarted you?
9 Responses to "Are You Smarter Than A Two Year Old?"
We saw the little people alphabet animal toy and had to think of an animal for every letter. Neither my husband or I could think of U or X. We ended up looking it up on the internet. 
My 2 year old loves to say things like “M for Mommy” “D is for Daddy” “H is for Hailey” and the other day while driving in the car we were rehearsing our “family letters.” She goes through her list of what she knows telling me “D is for Daddy and D is for Buddy” Buddy is what she calls her one year old brother. I told her “No, B is for Buddy. D is for Daddy.” She was very insistant and persistant that “D is TOO for Buddy” until it finally dawned on me…his NAME is actually Derek - so she’s right - D is how you start Buddy’s name!
We have an animal alphabet wallpaper border decorating my toddler’s room. In each panel, there is an artist’s rendering of an animal in a scene containing several items beginning with the featured letter. I could never figure out what animal was pictured in the “N” panel. After looking it up today, I believe it is a numbat, which is an Australian marsupial. It looks something like a cross between a chipmunk and a squirrel, has black and white stripes that wrap around its back, and eats termites and ants.
Thank you for clearing that up Kay! We were playing with our nephew and that very same toy at his house on Easter and we could not for the life of us figure out what “U” was.
My daughter has a Little People (F/P) lift-the-flap book about going to the zoo and there us a Urial (and offspring - kid maybe?) featured on one of the pages, too. i usually glossed over it calling it a mountain goat, thinking she’d never encounter the Urial in real life. Now i guess i better not be so flippant about the Urial.
Thanks for forcing me to research this curious creature from my son’s alphabet cards: a Xanthos.
Sorry, meant to include this link above. It’s one of Achille’s semi-divine horses from The Illiad. Huh.
I always think of the trusty “newt” for N too, Kay! But Sandra Boynton’s alphabet book goes for the very easy “nightingale”. Why didn’t we think of that…?
My son has a book that uses an X-Ray Fish for the letter X. I’d never heard of such a thing. Using the trusty internet, I have discovered it is real. I suppose there aren’t a lot of X options for animals.
