Butts Speaks

Anyone who's been keeping up with this blog knows that little Button makes big noise. All the time. Talk, talk, talk, talk, talk. Or she's making her "concentration" noise--which she still does all the time whenever she's working on something tricky. But lately, she's actually been showing some signs of picking up random words--and yesterday she reached what is, I think, a major linguistic milestone: she repeated a word that I said to her.

Up to this point, there are several words that she's picked up on her own. "Momma," "Dadda," "No," and "Thank You," among a few others. She's not 100% reliable on these words yet as it often seems like she says them at random, but she says them often enough in the right context that we've been able to determine that she knows what she's trying to say at least. But these she did on her own. No matter how many times we've repeated a word for her, she's never even made an attempt to repeat it, until yesterday.

I held up a little plush soccer ball to her yesterday and said, "Ball." She looked at it and said, "Ba," several times and even attempted to put an "l" sound on the end of it with her last few attempts. She later proudly displayed her new word to Libby that evening (which was nice for verification purposes).

Then, today, she did it again. As I was getting Gabe ready for pre-school, I put his sandals on. Because he has ridiculously wide feet and because he has a tendency to splay his toes for some reason whenever I'm putting shoes on, his pinky toe caught on the side of his sandal as I slid it on. "Owwww," he whined. "Ow," Norah repeated. Then she tried it out another half dozen times for good measure.

Once I got him off to pre-school and she was alone with one less distraction, I tried to corner her in the living room to coax some words out of her for the camera, without much luck.

As is usually the case with my children, she refused to perform the action I asked of her. She did, however, say "Thank You" when I handed her back her bottle. You have to listen for it, and you have to know what the words are before she says them to have any sort of clue what she's saying, but she says it. "Tiku" is probably closer to what she actually says.

You'll also get to see her do a little random dancing in there. She's quite taken by dancing these days. She's even worked on her repertoire a little to spice things up with variety. She's got a butt shake, a shoulder shimmy, and in the past few days she's started stomping one of her feet. Of course, she doesn't really do any of that in the video, she just threw in a few random shimmies here and there while she was doing her normal moving around.

I wish I'd been keeping a better log of Gabe's language development before I started this blog (he was something like 20 months when I started the blog), so I could tell if she's ahead or behind where he was by this point.

Not that it matters, really, I'm just very eager for her to start talking well enough to tell us what she wants. I'm hoping that will help prevent the three or four dozen tantrums she throws a day when whatever she wants to have happen doesn't and we have no idea what she wants.