Chatty Cathy

Flower is….let’s say blossoming….when it comes to communication. She still has a few months until her second birthday and she’s really starting to chatter. She was a slower talker, at least compared to Princess. I know you should never compare skills such as walking and talking at certain ages because every child acquires these skills at a different age, but when you only have two girls it’s hard not to.

Princess was an early talker. She wasn’t interesting in walking, heck she wasn’t interested in rolling over or anything which required movement. But the girl could talk. Before her first birthday she was speaking in phrases and within months she was speaking in complete sentences. Princess was easy to understand. She annunciated her words well and never really “baby talked”. People that didn’t know her thought she was a lot older than she really was. I’m saying this not so much to brag but to give you some background as to the only standard we have for comparison.

Flower hasn’t really been interested in expressing herself with words. She’s content to point and whine until we give in and play the game of guessing what she wants. I’m sure she enjoys watching us try to figure out exactly what she wants by holding up every item on the table during dinner. I’ve tried to hold out and force her to “tell” me what she wants because I know she can but I always give in. I think its part of what I call the second child syndrome. When you only have one child you have more time to spend dwelling on the details. Once you introduce subsequent children your time diminishes exponentially so you give in more quickly, at least we do.

I also blame some of her opposition to words on sign language. When Princess was a baby we bought the My Baby Can Talk DVD that was suppose to teach your baby to sign which would allow them to express themselves before they were able to talk and eliminate some of the communication gap. Princess learned to talk before we had a chance to learn to sign be she did enjoy the DVD none the less. So I decided to give it another try with Flower. Flower immediately learned how to sign “more” which she used (and we encouraged) extensively. But when we tried to encourage her to ask for things using words rather than signing she refused and would only sign. So that idea backfired on me. I’ve read about how signing can help children talk sooner and increase the size of their vocabulary but in our case it didn’t work that way.

In the last couple months Flower has started babbling and using a few words here and there. Every now and then she’ll put a few words together in what sounds like a phrase and she can mimic you very well when she wants to. She likes to pretend she’s talking to you by mumbling a bunch of sounds really fast and then smiling….kind of like she’s teasing us. She follows directions really well so we know she understands what we’re saying, she just chooses not to indulge us by answering our questions. Flower likes to babble on about something as if we’re having a conversation. I guess we are in some ways. I respond to her babbling and ask her another question to which she responds. If I only knew what was going through that little head. When we try to get her to say something she gets a mischievous glimmer in her eyes and I’m afraid when the time is right she’s going to be quite the little chatterbox.

The other day I was getting ready to take her upstairs for a nap. I told her to head up to her room. She walked over to the stairs, started to climb up and then stopped, as if she forgot to do something. She turned around, walked over to her baby doll that was lying in the middle of the floor, leaned over the doll, pointed her finger at her and babbled some instructions very seriously. I guess it was time for her baby doll to lie down and go to sleep too.