The Sounds of Fall

Hello hello hello! Jesse, Eily, and I have had two weeks now to settle into our new fall routine, which means it's high time I satisfied everyone's burning questions about what our little lady is up to these days. There's a lot to report, but in the interest of time we're going to stick to the new talent I'm most interested in right now - language development!

Eily is catching onto the concept of language by leaps and bounds every day. Just this morning, she's parroted no less than five words she heard me say - diaper, thank you, locked, and a few others I can't remember at the moment. She's also become good at picking out words she knows from the middle of a sentence. So if you were to say to her, "I saw Daddy at work today," she would immediately start chanting "Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!" She also understands a lot more than she can say. I can tell her to close a door or ask her where her nose is, and she responds accordingly by closing the door or touching her nose. I can tell her to go get certain items, put things down, go see someone, etc. I love watching her eyes light up when she understands a request and knows how to complete the task. No matter what it is I've asked her to do, it's completion is almost always followed by a hearty round of applause for herself.

Sometimes I'm baffled by her ability to grasp some of the more abstract concepts of the words she already knows. For example, last weekend we were in the Finger Lakes of NY visiting Auntie Kiki, Uncle B, and the rest of the Kahm family. The instant Eily saw the lake, she started making the sign for water and saying "wa wa!" with much excitement. Since the time she learned the word and sign for water, she has only ever seen it in a cup or coming out of a faucet. If you think about it, a lake looks very different from either of those things, but she had no problem identifying what she was looking at without being told.

Another fun one to observe is her recognition of animals. She can look at a photo, a drawing, or even an outline of something like a dog or a cow and immediately recognize what she's looking at. With the exception of dogs and kitties, she refers to most animals by their sounds, but you can still tell that she understands what she's seeing.

Speaking of animal sounds, those are a scream. I think she's getting tired of us asking her what a cow says or what a duck says since we do it on a daily basis. But what on earth could be funnier than a one year old who refuses to say "moo" or "quack" and instead insists on imitating the actual sound the animals make? Take "quack" for example. Instead of saying "quack," she makes this gravelly "gwahgwahgwah" sound over and over again. Honestly, it sounds a lot more like a duck call than "quack quack" does. And instead of saying "woof" for a dog, she pants. That one is really funny because we never taught it to her. She just started panting every time she saw a dog, and it seems to have stuck. And I guess she's right. After all, you see dogs panting almost all the time, with only occasional barks.

One interesting thing I've noticed (and was admittedly worried about) is her resistance to make the "m" sound. But now that I'm studying speech and language pathology, I've realized it's a completely normal part of her language development. Apparently, children do not fully possess the ability to pronounce all of the different sounds of their native language until somewhere between 5-7 years old. And when they do encounter a sound they can't yet make, they tend to deal with it in a consistent manner. In Eily's case, she has a b for m substitution - her m's become b's. So most of the time she calls me "baba" instead of mama. Or if she's in a hurry, I'm just "Bab," which sounds oddly like Bob. She's starting to go "mmmmm" if she wants a kiss, and has said "mama" clearly a few times recently, so I have a feeling she'll be mastering the "m" in the near future.

And perhaps the most exciting thing of all is Eily's rekindled interest in having books read to her. I read a lot to her when she was a newborn (and had no choice). When she started developing more of her motor skills and gained mobility, though, she become completely disinterested in sitting down for a story, even at bedtime. Now, however, if I put her down for bed without a story, she immediately stands up in her crib and points across the room to her bookshelf. She'll yell at me until I pick her up and settle into the rocking chair with her on my lap. We end up reading at least three books a night, regardless of their length. She even sits still for the long ones now. During the day, she often throws books into my lap while I'm working. I'll stop and read to her until she decides she's had enough. Sometimes it's only a minute or two; other times she'll let me finish the book, then run and grab another.

I guess I'll stop before this starts getting too boring....after all, how much can one say about their daughter's small but growing vocabulary? I know I tend to geek out about this kind of thing, but honestly I find it so fascinating. So to wrap it up with something fun, I thought I'd share with you the list of words Eily is consistently saying as of today.

Hi
Daddy/Dada
ball
water
kitty/kitty cat
dog
down
Mama ("Baba")
Eily
baby
bath
eat - this is her absolute FAVORITE word...but more on that in another post
cheese
juice
wee - as in "this is fun!"

She's also mastered these signs, but tends not to say the accompanying word yet:

more
bye
please
no (head shake)
milk


And finally, here's a cute picture taken by Kiara (Auntie Kiki) this past weekend when we went apple picking. We lost count of how many apples Eily ate, but as you can see here she enjoyed every single one of them.