Talking

It has occurred to me that in all the talking about what we have been doing, I have been neglecting talking about Anna. She has been talking up a storm. Most of the time it is incomprehensible to us but she sure knows what she is talking about. She is starting make sense to us though. Kristen pointed out that with little kids, they start to talk in one of two ways. Either they start with words individually, add more words then finally put them together into sentences. Or, they start with full sentences that are hard to understand but get more and more clear as they get older. Anna seems to be falling into the latter category.

Of course she has her individual words. She is really good with mommy and daddy, cheese (also a favorite food), no, bye-bye, pretty (this is a word she hears a lot, though she isn't saying it as much lately), baby (she loves babies), uh-oh, bubble (used for all round things, like balls). Just last week, she started saying duck. Then just today, she said yellow and pointed to the yellow lion after we asked where the yellow was. I'm not sure how intentional it was but I like to think she knows what she was doing.

On top of these singular words, she has sentences. The strange thing about the sentences is that they aren't really being repeated, they're more like a one-time thing. These are the sentences we have heard so far: 'stop it' (while I was putting sunscreen on her face, her first sentence and it was funny the first time), 'read to me' (naturally anything else I was doing was less important than the book she brought me after that), 'I want Daddy', 'thank you Mommy', 'milk, please' (always polite) and I think 'excuse me'.

We are also working on animal sounds. She is really good at roaring like a lion. She has a stuffed lion that we keep in her crib and when we got her up in the morning she would hold out her lion to me and go roar. When she started saying duck, Jason started working on her to say quack. What she says doesn't really sound like quack but we take it. The funniest animal sound is for a dog. Rather than bark in anyway, she will pant with her tongue out. It makes sense since that is what she hears dogs say mostly but it's still funny.