Being a mother of two is so incredibly different from having only one. Our path with BabyGirl has been different in every way imaginable from JediBoy - not only international adoption compared to childbirth, or girl compared to boy, but because they are two very dissimilar children.
She is active, fearless and interested in moving her body. She spent half an hour - half an hour! - last week practicing walking down the bottom stair instead of crawling. JediBoy has never shown that kind of patience for practicing any physical skill. He spent most of his energy at this age communicating. He wanted to sit and listen to a foot-high stack of books and then he would talk, talk, talk.
It has been a learning curve for all of us to interact with a toddler who has much fewer expressive language skills, but we see so clearly that it comes in its own time.
At 19 months, BabyGirl has very few words - and those she has are mostly family words - things that only we know. She says “NO!” and “Uh-oh!”, “Mama” and “Dada.” Other than that she has sounds for drink (buzzing her lips - I’m not sure why) and a “bah-ah” sound for bottle (sippy cup); she says “mm-ow” for cats and “uff-uff” for dogs, “bruh” for brother and “ss-ss” for her own name. She says “shh” both meaning to be quiet and when she’s looking for her shoes, “ba” for many things including ball and bird (though she signs too when she’s saying bird) and lately she’s been saying “mun-mun” for both monkey and chipmunk. This week she added “num-num” when she’s eating, and today she came out with her first semi-sentence.
Mun-mun num-num!
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I love the way small children put language concepts together.
