Great Leaps

My 1.5 year-old, Q, has thus far been the strong silent type. His sister does enough talking for any three people, so I have totally not been sweating Q's taciturn ways. He makes himself clearly understood with out all of those bothersome syllables that everyone else uses.

That said, in the last week or so, Q's vocab has totally EXPLODED! I remember Z doing this same thing when she was about three months younger than Q is now. It was amazing to behold then, and in some ways even more amazing this time. You know how it is: everything your first kid does is amazing, so in retrospect it is hard to know what really was.

The first cool thing I noticed was during story time before bed. We were reading a (Blech! Barney) story that asked you to pick out certain items on each page. Not all of them were even common items, but Q picked out every one correctly. Wow! So now that I was cued in to his language progress I started noticing that he was doing a lot of naming of things: cereal (!), dog, shoe, ball, etc. Then I noticed that he had started pointing and saying, "Eat! Eat! Eat!" when he was hungry and food was in sight.

The funny thing about his words is that they are all multi-functional. For instance, 'shoe' means shoe, sock, and/or foot, depending on the context. Z did exactly the same thing. 'Cereal' means lots of things, too. It means that he is hungry, thirsty, wants a snack (that is not necessarily cereal-based), and/or that his cup or plate is empty.

More recently, we were reading Barnyard Dance by Sandra Boynton and he started naming the animals and sometimes even the animal sounds. Tonight, we read Are You My Mother by P.D. Eastman. There is a very minor character of a kitten about half way through. As soon as I turned the page, he started meowing. He'd never done that before!

Children (especially my children!) are so amazing. This is a good thing. Otherwise I might eat them - and not in a "Nom, nom, I could eat you up!" sort of way, either! This motherhood gig isn't for sissies, but the rewards are pretty darn fabulous.