Holy smokes. I’ve been a paranoid SLP-mama, watching and listening to Emmie’s speech development, fretting over her babble (mostly vowels, definitely not a “jabber-er”), and breathing sighs of relief every time I hear another consonant or some nice canonical babbling.

You’d think I would have learned by now that Emmie is a “stair-step learner,” as my wise friend Jen puts it. One day, she doesn’t do something, and then one day she just does. In a week, it’s the new normal. It’s been exactly the same for her words.

Until a few days ago, all Emmie verbally said was “mama,” “dada” and “ball.” Then on Monday, she started saying a very clear “muh muh muh” while each and every time she signed MORE. The same day, she started saying “nononono” in the cutest voice possible, making “no” the most adorable thing I’d ever heard. Since then, she’s added “ah duh” for all done, and “bah” for “bye,” and has imitated (very clearly) boot, shoes, and bird. “Ba” now also means Soothie, ball, and bye but if you listen close enough, I swear they are different!

But our favorite is what she calls Jasper: “Bob.” It’s hilarious. I think it’s because she’s trying to say “Bobber,” or something like it, but she just ends at “Bob.” It definitely means Jasper though!

As one who studies language development, it’s crazy to me that she can come up with pretty decent representations of these words without having all the practice of babbling that we always talk about. I mean, yes, she has babbled, but never the long strings of jargon so many kids do, and I can usually count the number of times she babbles in a day on one hand (not very much practice overall).

She’s also FINALLY started signing “please,” which makes her demands much more pleasant than constantly being signed/told MORE.

Also in the super-cool language front slash cognitive development, she talked about her first past event. One morning, she and I were awake to see Daddy get in his car and drive to work, and all day she pointed out the window to where the car had been and signed/said “Dada” and then waved bye out the window. Even a few days later, when we had not seen him leave, when I opened the curtains, she looked out the window and signed “Dada” and said “ba” (bye). SO COOL. I absolutely love getting to see inside her mind (hint: Dada figures heavily into her daily thoughts).

Sorry for the light posting these days. Little Miss has been sprouting 6 teeth at once, including all 4 molars, on top of getting sick with some mysterious virus that caused a rash and now apparently a cough (with croup running rampant around these parts, Peter and I listen keenly to each wheeze and cough), all of which have meant that she’s back to waking up at night a lot more, so none of us are sleeping well. Maybe this is also a sleep-regression tied to her new skill of speech? In any case, we are all tired, and blogging is slipping lower on my priority list these days (as the dirty dishes mount and the laundry pile grows, and small objects keep mysteriously leaping out of drawers to land all over the floor).