A mother who was initially baffled by the words her young daughter chose to describe something eventually discovered the unexpected origins of those words.

The toddler period is an important period in a young child’s development, especially As for the dictionary?. As a 2016 study published in the journal Applied Psycholinguistics The average 18-month-old child recognizes about 260 words, while preschool-aged children know anywhere from 1,000 to 10,000 words.

Parents can play a role in nurturing this development through activities such as reading and simple conversation. Florida native Victoria Swift, a former elementary school teacher, knows more about this than most.

Her daughter is only 17 months old and is already developing a nice vocabulary. But Swift stopped scratching her head when she recently noticed her teenage daughter referring to her peppermint and gingerbread man toys as “hippos.”

Swift was initially stunned. “He knows a lot of words and is super smart, so I knew there had to be a reason why he named the gingerbread ‘hippo’,” she said.

One day suddenly something “clicked” in his head. “”He loves reading books, and I remembered that hippo was one of the many words he said while reading one of his books. ABC books,” he said.

When he re-read the book, Swift discovered that the page explaining “H is for Hippo” came immediately before the page explaining “G is for Gingerbread,” which featured a picture of a gingerbread man, complete with a gingerbread house and a path made of peppermint candies.

Swift’s initial confusion gave way to something else. At that moment she became a very proud mother. “All parents think their kids are smart, but I thought this was the next level,” he said. “I used to be an elementary school teacher, so seeing his ability to connect was very impressive to me for his age.”

Swift said that’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to her daughter’s vocabulary. “He remembers a lot of words and pictures and already puts two words together to communicate,” she said.

Wanting to share her discovery, Swift published a video explaining what happened to her. tiktok under the handle victory. “I share little snippets of my life on my social media all the time,” Swift said. “I thought this was a cute video he made people laugh But I didn’t expect it to get this much attention!”

At the time of this writing, Swift’s video has been viewed more than 3.4 million times, and viewers have been eagerly awaiting it. share similar stories. “My little one called the Octopus Applepus. It took her months to realize that the detangling spray was an octopus with an apple-shaped head,” one wrote. “My niece was saying ‘Awww’ to herself because every time we saw her or showed her a picture of her we were like ‘awww that’s a picture,'” another said.

A third commented: “My son’s second word was ‘Saturday’. It took us a while to realize that this was his favorite page from ‘A Very Hungry Caterpillar’.” With the fourth addition: “My 2-year-old grandson was calling the light bulbs ‘ideas’.”