Another orator in the family

My apologies.  I have been remiss in revelling in the amount of braggadocio that is my wont when either of my sons do something that I think approaches the essence of cool.  When they travel along that asymptotic line which, as it approaches infinity, very nearly makes one as cool as The Fonz.  It is, of course, utterly impossible to get there, but a mathematical approximation is within the reach of some.

So has the younger Fraser done.

He's talking.

My wife and I have been waiting for it, and he's not disappointed either of us.  To my wife's barely contained glee, I cannot deny that wee Tavish's first recognisable word was definitely "mommy".  (My {our?} criteria for a word to be acknowledged as having meaning when uttered by one of our sons is that there is a definite association made between the sound and an object or, at a more advanced level, with an action or a concept.  Thus, while it was entirely feasible that, at one year of age, Tavish could have - and perhaps even did - mashed together the sorts of sounds that ended up sounding like "trilobite", it is astronomically unlikely that he would have been able to make any sort of association between his glottal meandering and a long-extinct three-lobed arthropod.)

So, "mommy" it was.

His progression since then has been astounding.  The insufferably proud parent in me takes it fully as our due.  We talk a LOT to our boys and I think one of the keys has been an effort to provide verbal cues for the things each of them takes an interest in.  So, much as I'd love for Tavish to pick up on the identification of a series of prime numbers, I'm more than content to brag about him being right more than 75 percent of the time when he says "tree".  There is a wallpaper border that runs around his nursery at change table level, and it is festooned with cute little leopards, giraffes, zebras, trees and clouds.  He's aced "tree" and "zebra", though the latter word is still probably only identifiable by me or my wife. 

Just yesterday he spent a solid two minutes pointing at one cloud in particular, jabbing it with a pudgy finger until he was certain he had his daddy's voice associated with his digital thrusts.  He tried the word out for himself and seemed pretty pleased (as was I) with his fledgling effort.

My favourite though - and colour me biased if you must - is his enthusiastic abuse of the word "daddy".  When I get home from work I can hear him nearly from within my truck.  He begins by pounding on the living room window with his fleshy palms.  When he sees me walk up the driveway, he turns around and trundles to the front screen door where he presses his face up hard against the screen and gives me a toothy, smoosh-nosed grin and a Gatling gun barrage of "Daddy! Daddy! Daddy! Daddy! ... "  Each little word flies unhindered into my beating heart.

I take my time removing my shoes at the front door since the wee boy continues to pepper me with the word until I stand up straight, when he raises his arms, squishes his cheeks with his shoulders, and says it one more time with a gleam of anticipation in his eyes.

HUG!

Other (less exciting) words in his vocabulary include "puppy", "cheese", and "stuck".  When he strains to climb out of his booster seat after supper, he grimaces and complains of being "stuck".  When he wants to pull his blanket off the couch but he can't because his older brother is sitting on it with a feigned look of ignorance, Tavish tugs and whines that it's stuck.

He hasn't yet strung together two words in a row, but at the rate he's going, it can't be very long.

Comments

[rick]

At this rate he'll be multisyllabically effulgent by a gratifyingly early age; perhaps within days.

Chances are good that he'll speak the way Melville writes, and then where will you be?

Congratulations.

[Mark]

That's a great description of how it feels to come home to an anxiously awaiting child.

We know that Ben's verbal acuity is due in part to our tendencies to blather on and on.

But, when he uses a word like "perhaps" correctly while playing, I'm not sure where he gets it. We don't go around saying "perhaps."

I'm sure Tavish soon will be spewing words that make you wonder "where'd he get that word?"

[Moksha Gren]

That's wonderful.

It is so difficult to suss intent from the random blather. Technically, Norah said Mama around 4 months or so. But here we are at 13 months and she still doesn't say it with what I would count as meaning. I think many parents are over eager in what they count. My Mom visits and proudly annouces that every other sound the little girl makes is a word. Wishful thinking is a powerful drug.

What makes it tricky on our end is ASL. We've been very dilligent in teaching Norah sign language. She has quite a few words she can sign accurately, prooving that her linguistic channels are firing, but do those count as "words" in the sense that most people are asking? Probably not. She's in a linguistic no-man's land...words with no verbal ability.

I'm very much looking forward to the "Daddy, Daddy!" phase

[Émilie B]

That's really wonderful of Tavish! I can't imagine how amazing it must be to have a talking child. Xavier's communicating alright, but meant words must really be something else. As he's accomplished a lot of other essential stuff babies learn by now (crawling, walking, etc.), I'm looking forward to language as his next big step of development. So far he's chatting and has started trying to imitate words we tell him ("allo"/hi picked up at daycare, "oiseau"/bird my mom keeps pointing out to him from his image book or the window with the sky-pointing finger to go with it, even a pretty garbled "poisson"/fish from observing the fishtank, with accompanying bubble sound - actually we're probably pushing our interpretation of this one a little too far).

Moksha's comment reminds me of my own perception when filling in the baby book and getting to the "first word" field. When Xavier started chatting, he started with the "m" consonant, and "a" is the easy first vowell. Eventually he strung together syllables - mamama, baba, dadada - of course, but words? We have friends who have been proud to announce their kids were saying "maman" and "papa" very early on, but I've never been big on boasting Xavier could vocalize similar stuff. It came so gradually, I can't really put a definite date on it, and for me - sad as it is to admit - it's really missing substance until I notice he's associating a concept with the word. That's not to say I don't LOVE to hear him chat away in the back seat when we've just picked him up from the babysitter's after work and are heading home. I like to imagine he's recounting his day to us, as he well might in the future. If anything, it's charming to see the imitation efforts he has started on lately.

Encore bravo, Tavish! and to his proud (and well identified) daddy.