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Wednesday, April 30, 2008

I'm bappled

When Anaya was little, we kept trying to coax words out of her. ("Dada. Anaya, can you say Dada? Hey, I think she really said it this time!") "Just wait!" My mom warned me. "When this one gets talking, she's never going to shut up!" (I wonder how she knew...certainly not from raising Mommy...)

She was right. Anaya has verbal diarrhea. I can't even get her to be quiet when I send her to her room alone to think. She complains loudly from her solitary confinement, most notably about Mommy's weaknesses. ("I was PRAYING, Mommy!" she will explain in exasperation if I confront her on this quirk.)

Then we had Seth. Sweet, poky Seth, who didn't want to bother to say things until he could say them in full sentences--or at least astonish us with a whole string of words. (Or maybe he just didn't want us to know that he understood what we told him to do.)

Now we have Skyler, who gives every indication of plotting to follow in his big sister's linguistic footsteps. At fifteen months, he's been amassing new words at the rate of at least one or two a day, so he's probably up to a vocabulary of twenty or thirty words now. (It's kind of hard to tell, because "thank you" and "cuckoo" and "cracker" all sound about the same, "co-co," even though he uses each one in its appropriate context. He has this most adorable way of putting a pause between his syllables, just for effect.)

This morning he spotted an apple in my hand. "Bap-ple!" he announced brightly. Wow. Are his siblings tutoring him on the sly whenever I step out of the room?

Poor Seth. He'll never get a word in edgewise.

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