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)
We had a lot of bathroom fun today, from experimenting with the potty seat (climbing on it, that is), to moving the stool, to turning on water, to making funny faces in the reflection of the faucet, to lining up the toothbrush just so on the sink.
