Draft written by Shannon, posted by her mom, Gretchen.

Dearest, darling-est Emmie,

Well, it happened. You turned two! I can’t believe it’s already been two years, and at the same time, I can’t believe you’ve only been in our lives for two short years.

It’s been a few months since I’ve written you a letter, mainly because you keep us busy!

You really hit your language explosion within the past 2 months. Literally, one day you would combine 2 words a few times a day, then the next day almost everything out of your mouth was “Mama sit” or “Emmie eat.” Within a few weeks, you were combining 3 or more words and now you routinely express completely novel thoughts all on your own.

As I might have expected, you are extremely clear in your pronunciation (even if it’s not right), and every word has a meaning. Where other kids use what we speechies call “jargon” (sounds like real sentences but doesn’t actually mean anything), you only use real words, even if they are a bit choppy. I’ve joked with my other SLP friends that it’s like you have Broca’s aphasia and other kids have Wernicke’s aphasia. You have a lot of content and can make sentences like “Mama, Dada, Emmie eat food table go hungry” But it might sound more like “Mama, Dada, Emmie. Eat food. Table. Go. Hungry!”

You sort of have little chunks of language that you put together to make longer sentences. Lately, you’ve been adding “it,” as in “Emmie eat it” and “Mama get it.”

You are so incredibly sweet. You LOVE your babies. You rock them and feed them milk, change their diapers, shush them and kiss them. You narrate your play step by step… “Baby hung-gee? Baby food? Baby spoon. Bowl. Fork knife” etc. etc. I just love how long you can play all on your own. Daddy and I still get invited to quite a few tea parties (which consist of us sitting patiently wherever you’ve directed us while you run back and forth to your kitchen getting various utensils and play foods until eventually we all have a motley, but equal, place setting in front of us).