Leilani is rapidly developing language and comprehension skills, it seems like she does something new every day. Gone are the days when she was a passive baby who just observed the world, smiled at her parents, and cried when she needed something. Now she has playing habits, understands a lot of language, knows many “words” (many animal sounds) that she can say when asked, and even responds to questions, directions, and commands. Here are a few recent anecdotes:
- We always end up with random baby items all over the house, and one day she found a bib on the floor while exploring in the living room. She picked it up and waved it around, like she does with many cloth items. Thinking it probably fell from the laundry basket, I wanted to take it from her. When she realized this, she put it on her head and pulled it around her neck. She didn’t put it on or even try to, but she obviously knew it was a bib. Realizing it was late morning and she had her usual light breakfast, I asked if she was hungry. She answered with a few syllables of baby-talk that definitely had a positive, up-beat tone, so I took her to the kitchen and fed her.
- I was with her in the play-room, and she had spread lots of toys all around. After a while, I remembered I had given her the cell phone to play with, but I didn’t see it in the room anymore. I asked her in a playful voice “where’s the phone, where’s the cell phone?” She looked around the room and eventually stared in one direction. When I looked there too and moved closer to her eye-level, I could see the phone which had been hidden by the couch from my level.
- Leilani crawls all around the 4 main rooms of our house, for example from one bedroom to the other to find something new to play with. I assume she is starting to “know” where to go, not just go randomly to another place. So one day when she was playing with her in the play room, I heard my wife doing something in the kitchen and I wondered if Leilani could find her. I told Leilani to “go find Mommy in the kitchen, go see Mommy.” She looked up at me, looked around and when she heard noise in the kitchen she went and crawled to Mommy.
- We used to entertain and sometimes pacify Leilani by holding or bouncing her in front of our curio displays. It was enough just to have something to look at. But recently, she isn’t interested unless we interact with her and tell her about the objects. I think she likes to hear the names of things and she’s probably picking up vocabulary.
- One of the curio displays is in the hall, so we had never really shown it to her. But it has lots of little animal figures, stones and sea shells, and Mommy began to entertain her with the names of all the objects. It really was a big hit. First it kept her attention for a long time, then when she was looking for a new game to play she would crawl into the hall, stand up underneath the display and bang on the wall. More recently, she crawled into the hall and pointed at it. Now that I think about it, she must’ve learned that from us, because we often point out interesting things (like a cat or dog she hadn’t noticed), and she quickly understood that it wasn’t the finger that was important but where the finger was pointing.
- Like all babies, Leilani loves animal sounds. They entertain her and we use them to get her attention when she’s being cranky about something. She has her own words for dog and cat (panting and purring), but for the barnyard animals, she just has to believe us (there is actually a goat in the neighborhood, but it never says anything). She can now do the sheep (baaaa, or ba when she says it), and the cow (we say mooo, she says mmm because she can’t make the oo/ou sound yet). She loves books that have animals and we just read them by making the animal sound for each page. But some books have fish, so I started mimicking the mouth of a fish, opening and closing with only a faint “bubble” sound to get her attention. Now she learned that too, and makes the non-sound mouth motion when we see fish.
- She recently learned to make the sss and shh sound, and now she can say “fish” too. It started one day when I was trying to take her picture. Just to get her attention, I said “say cheese” and then to my great surprise she very clearly said “cheese.” Then Mommy taught her that the snake which we saw in California goes ss-ss (even though it goes rattle-rattle).
- Finally, she is learning that she is “baby” or “baba” as she says it. She can pick out her picture among others when Mommy tells her to “find the baby.” She also sometimes pats herself when we say “patsch patsch baby (pat the baby). Oh, and since she knows how to pat (with an open hand) it was easy to teach her to “give me five” since it’s essentially the same thing. I’m not sure at what age she will really differentiate herself from others, because when she see a picture of all three of us, she usually says “dada” (which makes me happy) and doesn’t seem to associate “mommy” or “baby” with the photo.