As amazing as her newfound mobility is, perhaps the biggest change in the past six months has been her increased ability to talk. She had been already using sign language to communicate with us even before her first birthday, but now it seems like her vocabulary has been growing almost daily. And she is not just saying one word; frequently she strings several of them together in sentences. Just the other day, she sat down on the stairs, pointed to the spot next to her, and said, 'Daddy sit here now'.
I never cease to be amazed at what she has picked up. She can count to 10, for instance, and sometimes does that to put herself to sleep. She has known tons of body parts and types of clothing for months, but now she is also getting colors and can identify pretty much any of her toys by name and type.
The biggest challenges right now are that she sometimes adopts her own terminology for things, and sometimes she can't quite pronounce what she wants to say. She pronounces 'c' as 't', so most words with a 'c' sound sound like 't' words. For instance, 'tat' instead of 'cat'. It can get pretty tricky! She likes to tell me which clothes she wants to wear in the morning. When I ask her what pants she wants, she'll reply, 'tatty'. But she means 'khaki'. Took me a while to get that one!
Another word that challenges her is 'cupcake'. Sometimes she says 'tuptake', but more often she just uses the word 'tata', one of her Alexisms. She has a bunch of those. For instance, she calls her nanny 'Nana', and the nanny's husband Rich she calls 'Ree Ree'. Her word for pizza is 'tabba' (no idea where that came from), but she understands what you mean when you say 'pizza', so it's probably just that she doesn't feel comfortable saying that word. 'Th' is another challenging sound for her, so there is a lot of 'dis' and 'dat' coming from her right now. But she's quite good at identifying something she wants. If she wants you to put cream on a 'booboo', she'll identify it by pointing and saying 'cream dis part'.
Her diet has also expanded a lot. She loves ice cream, which she calls 'um', and french fries, which she labels as 'chen chies' ('f' is another letter that she has trouble pronouncing). Strawberries, avocados, pizza (she loves that), clam chowder, 'tots' (ie tater tots), cheese, potato chips, popsicles, apples, and blueberries are some other favorites at the moment. She hasn't acquired a taste for meat yet, but I expect that will be coming soon.
Next time I'll talk more about how her world is expanding, as she not only reads books but has started watching some TV and interacting more with kids her own age.
