Kaylin T. Mouse (the “t” stands for “The” or “Tiberious” depending on my mood by the way) has reached yet another development milestone. She now says actual real life words, and what's more they're words that people other than us can (kind of) understand.
One of Kaylin's favourite things to do is read books. One of the first things she does in the morning is points to her shelf of books. She then takes a book and flips the pages, pointing at certain things, and gibbering away to herself.
This then morphed into her saying words.
First up was “Kitty”, the girl has got some powerful fascination with kitties, and I'm not sure why. For the first 8 months of her life this little stuffed Ty Persian kitty named Peaches sat under a chair in her bedroom (the chair which holds “The bear in the chair” and “Chair bunny” as I refer to them every night). One day she discovered this kitty under the chair and picked her up and hugged her. Then she started dragging kitty around the house, and saying “kiy key kiy key” under her breath. That transformed into “Kitty” one day, and we declared that her first official word. She points to kitties in books, and with great gusto nods her head and says “Kitty”.
Word number two was definately ball, or as she says it (pronouncing every letter) “baaaaaawwwwwwwwlllll”, she grabs a ball and holds it chanting “baaaawwwwwlll” over and over again in her cute little girl voice.
Her first sign was for Duck (she quacks her hand like a duck's beak quacking), because of this great little song Char sang to her for months, but last week she started saying “Duuut”, which I'm pretty sure is “Duck”.
The other day she started pointing at pictures of herself and saying “Kay!”, which we think means Kaylin.
Put them together and you've almost got a sentence! “Kay dut bawwwwwwwwl kitty”.
Of course that's not the end of her brilliance. She also points out a variety of objects and animals, she can find puppies, balls, apples, bannanas, kitties and ducks in her books. The best is when you relate a new word to an item and you see the wheels turning in her head as synapses are forming and she's associating things with these wonderful things called words.
Last night though the best thing ever happened. We were listening to the Beatles song “Blackbird”, which is one of my favourite tunes of all time (even though I'm an Elvis guy, not a Beatles cat), and towards the end of the song a bird starts singing. Kaylin started pointing at the speaker, and Char and I watched her as she frantically started tearing through a nearby book. She got to the picture of the Parrot and urgently started pointing at it! “Yeah Kaylin, BIRDIE!” we both said excitedly, “Birdie!”.
That's by far my favourite moment of the week…isn't it odd how all of my favourite moments these days have to do with my awesome little girl and her beautiful mom?