Actually, I know I’m hearing voices. My question is, are they words?
I keep hearing from my friends who have babies around the same age as A and B that their children are saying all sorts of words…mama, dada, cat, dog, ball, refrigerator, esophagus…the list seems to go on and on.
Our girls have no shortage of sounds, but I don’t know if I can quite claim they’re talking yet. They both say “mama” and “dada”, but I guess I’m kinda waiting for them to address me a little more formally or something.
They both seem to say “baby”, which is one of the words I realized I must say a gazillion times a day as I address them (and, OK, the cats, too). They also seem to say “bye-bye” and “ball”.
Or…I can’t help but question…are they just learning the “b” sound, and I’m hearing what I want to hear when the context is right?
As a mama who writes down every.single.thing. that her girls do (it’ll be important when they’re the first twins to be president and vice president of the United States, ya know?), I am just feeling a lot of pressure to correctly identify their first words, along – of course – with when they said them, where, and what they were wearing.
This isn’t supposed to be so hard!
Ticker
2 comments:
I also found it hard to pinpoint the first (spoken) word from my daughters. I actually wanted to go back to my Linguistics professors in college and say, "Quit teaching that 'mother' is every child's first word in every language. We can't really tell!"
I'm also a documenter of everything. We had a notebook to keep track of feedings, diaper changes, all of it. My notebook plus my blog actually came in very handy when it was time for Melody and Jessica's speech evaluations, because the intake form wanted all sorts of details about the age at which they achieved their various milestones. For first word, I put two dates each: their first sign AND their first recognizable spoken word!
I don't think it's *supposed* to be hard, but I think if parents are honest with themselves, everyone struggles. For the longest time, my Mum denied the fact that my sister's first word was "Dimma", how she pronounced Jamila, our maid's name. Mum so desperately wanted it to be "Amma" (Mom). I think you're just being more honest that most. :)
Ugh...I feel for you! Mine are 19 months old and while Matt wants to say everything we say, Hailey has no interest...I mean, she grunts at everything. When she gets desperate, she can say something that resembles a word, but other than that, it's pretty wordless around here. My pedi said that he's more concerned with their receptive language at this point rather than expressive...meaning, do they understand what I say? Follow commands? Understand when I speak? The answer to all of those questions was "yes," so I'm not getting freaked out yet (okay...I say that, but I think about more than I should)!!! If you're not comfortable, talk to your doctor about getting a speech therapist out to evaluate...good luck! Remember this...they won't go to college grunting their demands...they'll come around!
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