Four days without photos can mean one thing only: rain. Non-stop freezing cold rain. But this morning I woke up and - tada - the skies opened and the Gods poured sunshine upon my world.  The baby woke up healthy - not even a runny nose left from her Thanksgiving Day cold. And then there was a knock on my door: a suit coming to sell me his financial analyst services and not a moment too soon given my Budget 2008 angst. Seriously if an orthodontist could also drop on by, well, that would be just perfect!

This week Addison turns 19 months old. I’m not going to do a whole 19 month update but I wanted to touch on her sudden burst in language skills. Some of my favorite posts (from blogs looooong ago) from Noah’s toddlerhood are the ones where I journaled about his little speech idiocyncracies. I love looking back on that stuff. I think all too quickly the little words and cute phrases are replaced with normal speech patterns and we forget.

It is so much fun! She still babbles in her Vietnamese sort of babble but she also has words for absolutely everything now. She adds several new words a day. I am sure her word count numbers in the hundreds at this point, easily. However her speech is not clear most of the time. In fact, of all my kids, her speech is the least articulate which makes for some detective work.

I remember hearing that baby sign language is a good thing to do for toddlers who aren’t easily understood. They can sign more easily than they can articulate. Well, not so for my baby girl who can sign just about as articulately as she can speak! She loves baby signs but is not exactly a perfectionist. At any given time she could be doing one or more signs that we have no idea what they are. And becuase every baby sign is accompanied by a usually not-well-articulated matching word, it seems fun but pretty useless to continue pushing the signs. I think we’ve fully transitioned to speaking instead of signing.

Some of the words Addy says are very clear, however. One of her favorite new words is “reach”. It totally cracks me up becuase I will see her sticking her arm through the banister trying to get to something on a step and saying “reeeeeaaaachh” as she stretches. She also loves to say “reaaaaccchhhh” when she pushes her little step-stool up to the light switch to turn the light on and off in the bathroom. She just cracks me up with her little “reach”.  We also think its really cute how perfectly she says Noah.

Another thing she started to do this week is to say hi to people “Hi Dada”, “Hi Mama”, “Hi Noah”. It is officially the first two words she has intentionally strung together. Also this week she has finally sort of started to sing. She has never been a real “singing” baby but this week she has started singing “ABC’s” and the Doodlebops theme and “Go for G” from They Might Be Giants.  Also she has been naming other things in our lives - our pets, grandparents, etc. She calls our kitty Anna “Anon” - it is so funny to me that she can say Noah so well but she can not say Anna. Learning to speak is so curious to me.

But then there are all those other words that sound nothing or almost nothing like their intended word or phrase. Addy has some word she uses to basically ask “what is that?”  that sounds like “Done Da” and today she started asking for Apple by saying “Awa”.   She asks for milk by saying “mi” along with the sign and “na” for Banana along with the sign which are probably her last two signs I really need to help me understand. She has a bunch of verbs now, most of which only remotely sound like their word: walk (wa), flush (fu), eat, jump, bounce (bow),  read (wee).

I have to say that I love all those little inarticulate speech patterns. They are so sweet to me. As many words as she says wrong, she is just as quickly correcting old words that she used to say wrong like sit (used to say ‘zit’) and dog (used to say “gog”). It is sort of bittersweet. I know that this is only just the beginning. By the time she’s two, she will be jabbering our ear off and hopefully we’ll be able to understand most of it. Meanwhile I sort of feel like I’m learning a new language.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 26th, 2007 at 12:42 pm and is filed under Milestones. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.