language explosion!

Yes, it is getting mighty chatty around here. I remember a year ago thinking about how quiet it was, even with a 16 month old, since she only said a few words and mostly signed. I told myself to enjoy it… and I’m glad I took a few minutes to appreciate it. But now I’m also in awe of my daughter’s ability to communicate with words, and they way it’s just sort of exploding all over the place.

Adjectives are really her favorite thing right now (the moon is high, the animal is big, the coffee is hot, the wind is cold, the baby is cute, the person is sad, the book is funny, etc). She’s also more clearly pronouncing words that used to be in “baby talk”, like the word water. For a long time she said “baba” for all water, from a glass of water to a puddle to an ocean. Then she said “wah-er” and now she is suddenly pronouncing “wa-ter” and in our state’s somewhat distinctive accent, too! Same with pah-ee (potty) which is now very much pah-dee. She even has some sentences, like “here we come, frog!”, “what are you doing?” and “where’d it go?”

This is a relief to me, as “communication” (speaking in words, really) was always the only category she was trailing behind in. But my mom-instincts said she was going to do just fine, just in her own time, since she was so early and advanced with fine and gross motor skills. It’s nice to be right!

With a more advanced command of language, comes more interest in books. As a one-year-old, she couldn’t hold still long enough to really do more but look at a few pages. She was just always on the go. But now we read at least two stories every night, and she usually requests the favorite story to be read again and again, as well as “reading” it to me. Her favorite stories right now have something “scary” in it, like the snow monster in Frozen, or a dark cave. She also likes any book with a moon in the illustrations, so books with night time scenes are popular. I myself am an avid reader (in audiobook format usually, at the moment), so this makes me very happy. The girl has about 200 books, we won’t be lacking in new reading material for a while!