Magic

My daughter is in the middle of a language explosion.

Mostly, our kids have taken their time figuring out words and sounds. With one part of my brain I know that this is fine, that kids have their own timetables. With another part of my brain, the part that resembles nothing so much as a squirrel on meth digging frantically for something to worry about, I spend a lot of time fretting. Is she on the slow end of normal expressively? Has he slipped into the "delayed" range? How's her comprehension progressing? Can he identify objects by function? When is she going to be able to manage a place shift within a word? Do I need to schedule an eval? Should I be trying to do therapy? Is it just their genes or is it ALL MY FAULT because I wasn't careful enough about long-chain fatty acids during pregnancy?

And then some internal switch flips and the magic happens.

There is nothing cooler on the planet than a kid learning to talk. It's kind of a wacky idea, that we can produce fairly random strings of sounds -- say, a voiced alveolar stop ("d") followed by a low unrounded back vowel ("aw") followed by a voiced velar stop ("g") -- and be confident that anyone who speaks the same language will know we're talking about a four-legged animal that barks. How do babies figure it out so early? It's even more remarkable, in my view, that toddlers catch on so quickly to the idea of bound morphemes: if you add an -s to "dog," it means more than one.

Stella's pulling out words I've never heard her use before, and I am eating it up. She wasn't very interested in dinner tonight, but when we went into the kitchen afterward she was very emphatic about the ham sitting on the counter. "Meat!" she intoned. When I did not leap to saw off a piece for her, she made sure I knew what she meant. "MEAT! Meat meat meat meat!"

Yesterday I was pushing her in the stroller and she wanted the...thing spread out over her head. What would you call it? It's not really an umbrella or an awning or a hood. She didn't know the word for it either, but it didn't stop her. "Hat!" she told me, gesturing. Close enough, right? Something that goes over your head to keep you dry?

Tonight she and Pete were having a disagreement that turned into a scuffle, and she came to me with a grievance. "Head!" she grumbled. "Pete!" It's not behavior I especially want to encourage but it's a milestone all the same: baby's first tattle.