The Way of Words

At AW's age, HL and I were having full blown conversations. He has an amazing grasp of language and once he got to talking, there was no looking back. For the most part his words are easily understood and he has an incredibly large vocabulary, stringing together long sentences like this one I wanted to blog about back in June, "Daaad... When it's Christmas time again you need to get me a fire hydrant statue to go with my fire engine statue. O-kay?" (Lest you think I'm making it up, I had it saved as a draft. That's a direct quote.) Because AW is younger, we knew his language skills would take time to develop. It's hard to develop language skills when everyone else talks for you, and he obviously does not get as much direct stimulation as HL did. We've not been overly concerned about AW’s lack of speech, but it sure seems as if he's been struggling a bit. He has always made all kinds of noises: he is great at mimicking sounds, clicking, smacking, etc., he even tries really hard to whistle. One of his favorites is growling like a lion, or a bear, or a tiger, or dinosaur, or a dragon, or a pirate, or a... He's been using single words for some time now, starting of course with mama. He knows dog and Elmo, brother, ship, Nemo, bar (as in banana bar), banana (though not with bar) and others; though if you did not hear him talk everyday it would be difficult to understand most of the words. For instance "fish" comes out like wheesh, (usually used in the context of goldfish snack crackers, as in I want wheesh), and train comes out like gee (with a hard G) and ja-ja for Jake (our dog). Some words aren’t even in the ball park, for instance all boys have a wee wee - it's just usually not their blankies. (Sorry son.) Now like I said, my youngest has a fondness for making sounds, and he sprinkles his single words liberally in his nonstop AW babble. In fact he must take after his aunt 'cause it's hard to get him to keep quiet sometimes. More recently the pace at which AW acquires new words has been rapidly increasing. He now typically picks up a word a day, and the words he knows he's been refining. Then last Friday, he picked up the word eat (he is a BIG fan of eating) and for the first time he put two words together "eat wheesh". I think he's getting it...