4 Cats And A Baby

Eirik has always been a chatterbox… but more and more its real words he’s using as opposed to gibberish! I really need to sit down and write down all the words he can use now!

He’s good with animal sounds even if he can’t say the animal name.  Yesterday I put on sweat pants that have sheep on them and he pointed and went “baa” and when we were looking at a book he pointed at a horse and said “neigh”! Progress!! I’m pretty sure he says close to 20 or 25 words now if you include animal sounds as words. Considering in December when we had him evaluated he was only saying about 3 this is HUGE.

Another thing I have noticed is him using one word for many things, which I know is common with toddlers. He can’t say penguin or pineapple but he can say puppy so he tends to use that for those P words too. He can’t say block so instead he says yellow because he knows there are yellow blocks.

I’ve been holding off on trying to teach him new signs because as his speech therapist noticed he’s not dropping signs and learning the words… I feel like he’s relying on the signs still. I feel like he probably could say those words, but he can sign them so that’s what he does instead. I know it sounds silly and I’ve read the research and know that signing doesn’t delay speech and I always reinforce a sign with the actual word… but there is that little thing in the back of my mind that says “just keep encouraging words”.

So, lets see what words I can remember that he knows…

pee, bathroom (can you tell what I am doing a lot of these days??), tea, puppy, arm, ear, no, bye bye, baa, neigh, meow, puppy, yellow, mommy, daddy, me, ahh choo (as in a sneeze), beep, cho cho (For a train), Mmmmm, uh oh, dirty… i’m sure there are actually more but I can’t think of them right now. I think he tried to say egg the other day as well as mouth but we’re not quite there yet.

The cutest part of course is the pronunciation of these words. Nothing is cuter than hearing him say yellow or puppy!

And as my coworker whose son was also delayed in speech reminded me yesterday “Trust me, you’ll wish he would start talking but once he does you’ll sometimes wish he would stop!”