F likes my T-shirts. I've got a whole bunch of increasingly elderly ones from when I was last a student. The usual kind of stuff - a few smart-alec quips, iconography from 80s kids' cartoons and other assorted geekery.
She points at whatever the T-shirt de jour is, and I read out whatever it says. Or explain the picture, or do some kind of minor performance appropriate to the garb. Standard 'dance monkey dance' father-based entertainment for her, to be done on command and then repeated for as long as it pleases her.
She learns very fast now, she's got a lot of vocab already (probably not far behind my Swedish, sadly). Even if she doesn't speak so much as babble, she certainly understands plenty. So she can point at the Thundercats logo and say "Ho!", of which I am justly proud. Sadly, Mr Benn's shopkeeper, who is on a big yellow and red circle about the same size and shape as the Thundercats' Cat Head, gets a little frown and a "ho?", so she's not quite there yet. Unless Mr Benn is currently cosplaying as Lion-O.
V recently bought me a T-shirt that says 'What Part Of Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn Don't You Understand' (look it up if you don't). If you do the cultish chanting bit in appropriately octopoid burbles, really hitting the gutterals, that always gets a good chortle and an indication to repeat.
All well and good - basic shape and sound associations, bonding with daddy, etc etc. However, her absolute favourite T-shirt is my Trapdoor one, the claymation series that Willie Rushton did the voices for. As featured on No. 73 in the mid-80s. She knows all the characters names, as featured on my stomach. Which means I've taught my daughter to point at Daddy and say 'Burk'.
Good.
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