Importing function words / what "warmer" means

While Amy typically keeps the languages very separate, she does occasionally import some German prepositions or other function words into German—perhaps because function words are among the most necessary to make sense of the sentence?

Some recent examples: "my tights go bis to my vest" (all the way up to it, right up to it), and "That's not a sand-pit, sondern something else" (but rather).

And interestingly Amy makes a fairly strong three-way distinction between "cold, warm, hot", which is perhaps not that surprising in itself; but she carries it to its logical conclusion by making "get warm" mean exactly that: approach the state "warm", from whichever direction.

For example, this morning while washing her hands, she said that the water was "hot" and asked me to "make it warmer". Now, for most people, "make it warmer" means "increase the temperature", but for her, it means "make it more like the temperature stereotypically referred to as warm"; in this case: "reduce the temperature"!

Or she might let some tea stand for a while before drinking it so that it can "get warm" first. (That is, so that it can cool down.)

Amyisms: Cr- and reflexives

Amy has difficulty distinguishing between sequences of initial stop + /r/ in my speech, it seems; for example, when I talked about there being no more trams in Hamburg, she mentioned pushing babies around (but that's "prams"). I think cr- also sounds like tr- and pr- to her.

This may be my pronunciation, or they may simply be hard to distinguish in general.

This also makes me misunderstand her occasionally, when she tries to use a word that starts with such a cluster and I don't recognise her pronunciation. For example, the other day she talked about something that sounded like /pfi:/, and I guessed "feet" -- but she meant "trees"!

Unrelatedly, her use of reflexives sometimes follows the German model (unsurprisingly); for example, this evening she told me, "I hurt meself the thumb" (= I hurt my thumb). ("Meself" is her usual form for "myself"; not sure why. Perhaps because German "mir" is "me" in English in non-reflexive uses?)

Sternum piercing

On the bus coming home from work this evening, I saw a young lady opposite me with a fair number of piercings around her face and ears, and one in a place I hadn't seen a piercing before so far: in front of her sternum, at the top of her cleavage.

It had a little silver sphere at the top (is that a "barbell"?) and a little silver cone about half an inch further down (mostly hidden by the neckline of what she was wearing), with a vertical scar in between the two, presumably from having the piercing inserted.

(Though I'll note that while Google Image searching on "sternum" to check that the sternum was where I had remembered it to be, three of the images on the front page were sternum piercings.)