august 2010
august 30 2010 19:22 pdt how could i forget animals? along with kitty and doggy, he says giraffe, lion, mouse, moose, bear, duck, sheep, bird, butterfly, fish. he said rhinoceros the other day- i couldn't believe it the first time, but he said it twice!
august 27 2010 08:24 pdt and places. pool, park, here (and 'right here!'), there, upstairs, downstairs. he's also pairing places with actions: 'go upstairs,' 'go downstairs,' 'go right here,' 'kitty go over there.' we've been working through the pixar library of movies, one after the other, and he's getting some of the character names and assigning some of his own. so 'watch woody!' means he wants toy story, and 'mousie movie' is ratatoullie...
august 25 2010 23:24 pdt lots of random nouns. blue car, mommy car, doggie, kitty, [tennis] racquet, kitchen, ball (often with a size or color modifier, e.g. pink ball) bath, light, dark, (and phrases like 'turn on light,' or 'dark! daddy turn on light') bus, truck (again with size or color modifier- blue truck or big truck), park, slide, stairs. and body parts- hand, head, nose, eyes, feet, toes, fingers, arm (sunscreen arm!) teeth, mouth.
august 24 2010 10:55 pdt the last time we went to the doctor for a checkup, one of the developmental assessments they checked was whether or not he was regularly speaking five or more words (at 18 months). i hadn't really thought about it much then, but i remember sitting in the office, counting on my fingers- and i came up with ten or so words right off the top of my head, and then i kept thinking of more as the day went on.
by now he's got to be close to 100 words, if not more. interspersed with the favorite phrases i'm going to try to list all the words i remember him saying, organied haphazardly by free-association category. so for foods, he says: milk, juice, blueberries, ice cream, pizza, cheese, noodles, apples, ketchup, pancakes, bananas. and about food at eating, he says: too hot, cold, more, all done, fork, spoon, pot, table. and for clothes, he says: shirt, shoes, socks, shorts, diaper, hat, jacket (not coat, jacket) and he distinguishes between daddy shoes, mommy shoes, david shoes, and wrong feet.
more later.
august 24 2010 07:55 pdt today's phrase is "stand up daddy." he has a couple of almost-sport activities that he likes- kicking the beach ball around, throwing tennis balls, hitting stuff with the tennis racquet. sometimes he'll play by himself, but most of the time he has more fun when someone is kicking the ball with him. and for most of these games, i'm not allowed to play unless i'm standing. if i sit, he'll come over, pull on my hand, and tell me "stand up daddy. get up."
august 23 2010 07:36 pdt still working for the city. might actually finish my first project this week- it's been going on since the second week i was there, so it will be nice to have a sense of completion. and lots of other work going on there as well. even though it's not really law, it's nice to feel useful.
i know i've been terrible about keeping up on blogging lately. it's been a busy summer. but now that we're coming up fast on d's 2nd birthday, i thought it might be worthwhile to spend a few minutes every week keeping track of his language progress. he's already talking lots, and repeating words that are spoken to him, and singing along with familiar kids' songs like the ABC's and the eensey weensey spider. he's doing ok with colors, although i have a nagging concern that he might be a little color blind (as last night, when he put the red cap on the green marker... although to be fair he only had two markers out, so it was a 50% chance that he'd get it backwards, and it's totally possible that he did it that way on purpose, so who knows) and he's counting to five(ish) and sometimes higher and lots of other absolutely amazing symbolic reasoning things that all seemed so far away just six months ago that i never realized how quickly it would come on once it got started.
so i'm going to try, for the next 100 days or so, to make regular notes of the really amazing words or phrases that he says, or even that he tries to say. i think my favorite one right now is 'bicycle.' he can point the bicycles out in his books, and when he sees one on the street he says something that has four syllables and sounds like he has a mouth full of marbles. but he means 'bicycle' and he's very very close to actually saying it so that other adults will understand.