I enjoy observing the development of baby-j’s words. Up until now, it’s been mostly nouns, but in the last month, he’s started to string words together.
His commands are actually descriptions or desires. Some examples:
“Try again.” (Meaning: I’m going to try something again.)
“Brush your teeth.” (Meaning: I’m going to brush my teeth. For hours at a time.)
“Come here.” (Meaning, oddly: I’m going to come there. If he wants you to “come here,” he uses…)
“Down” (Meaning: come down from the couch, or get out of bed, or anyplace else where you are comfortable, and read me a book.)
Of course, now that he can open the refrigerator door (!!!), he doesn’t need to use words as much when asking for food. Yesterday I came in to the kitchen to find him struggling with a bag of grapes he had pulled out of the fridge. Today I watched as he opened the fridge, grabbed some leftover pasta, a container of tomato sauce, and the green cylinder of Kraft parmesan cheese. I think he was going to try to figure out how to heat it up by himself if we didn’t.
It’s when he’s tired or cranky--or both--that baby-j reverts back to one word “sentences.” If P or I try to rock baby-j to sleep and he’s not being cooperative, he employs the noun-blurt technique: yelping out the names of things he sees or, in some cases, things he remembers that exist. Last night went something like this:
“Doggie!” (referring to his doggie bath towel, hanging on a hook)
“Lotion!” (referring to the bottle on the dresser that we use every night)
“Bedtime Stories!” (pronounced “beh-tahm staw-wees”)
“Mama!” (self-explanatory)
And then in desperation, as he drifted off to sleep, he sobbed,
“Cookie!” (nowhere in the vicinity)
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