It's Just a Phrase

Life in Toddlerland is quite a bit different from parenting a baby. Of course there are the ubiquitous battle of wills and the "I can do it" moments. To offset these, there seem to be fewer recognizable milestones. It's not exactly about firsts anymore. First words, steps, foods, etc. are things of the past. Who records "first jump" or "first mean face" in the baby book anyway? But there really are fantastic new moments happening all the time. We just don't realize what she's doing, or we assume that she's been doing that thing for a while and we just hadn't seen it. (A lot of things she picks up these days S and I tend to look at each other and say, "She must have got that from daycare")

Anyway, I do want to go on record here to say that R has been saying plenty of phrases lately. I don't know if I'd count them as sentences yet, but she's really getting across a lot more ideas by putting different sounds together. Some examples of what she said today:

coat on
daddy go
mommy sleeping
Stop it!

While giving her a bath tonight, S was chewing on some gum. Lately, R has been chewing her tongue a lot from teething, making it seem like she has something in her mouth (other than food). When she noticed her mommy's gum, she became interested and started saying "open mouth. Ahhh." A near perfect immitation of me asking her to open her mouth and say ahh when looking for lint or old food picked up off the floor.

Even when only using one word, she tends to be pretty good about making her meaning clear. "Downstairs" accompanied by pointing down and getting her face right in yours and nodding leaves little doubt that she wants to go downstairs. Pulling your arm and then patting at a particular spot on the floor while saying only "sit" gets its meaning across too. I even heard a story from her daycare teacher that she repeated instructions to a friend to "walk away" while pulling her along behind her. She repeated it for us later that day too. "N, walk away. N, walk away."

As you see from examples, she is very comfortable giving commands. Not only do we have a great communicator on our hands, but a budding future dictator.