New Vocabulary

Some of you may be expecting a post about how Abbie is walking/running all around the house by now.  Sorry to disappoint, but she has decided to take the slow lane on walking, and we are still stuck on 2-4 steps at a time.  She's becoming more excited about it and proud of herself when she walks, but it still requires a lot of encouragement for her to even try.

In the meantime, Abbie is developing quite a nice vocabulary.  Over the past many weeks, she has learned a number of animal sounds (the cow says "moo", the horse says "neigh", the sheep says "baa", and her favorite: the kitty cat says "meow").  In fact, when she saw my parents' cat, who meows A LOT, she often approached him saying "meowwwww" and seemingly tried to converse with him.  There are some animal sounds she has trouble with, but I think the concept is there, like: the duck says "cak" (because "qu" is too hard) and the snake says "*insert deep breath and wrinkled nose here*".  She sort of got confused between "sssss" with breath going out and the sound your nose makes when you breathe in.  It's funny nonetheless!

In addition to the adorable animal sounds, we taught her to answer "Who's your favorite uncle?" with "Matt!".  Abbie also uses the following words with some reliability: hi, bye, night night, more (as in, more food please!), done, kitty cat, nose, knee, toes.  Some words seem to make sense in her head, but don't come out quite right, such as: "butt" which means foot, and "bat" which means bath.

We're having a lot of fun with all of the new words, especially when she finds them funny herself.  This past weekend, she got the biggest kick out of me saying "Goodbye!".  She was literally cackling on the kitchen floor over and over.  Mark took a video, so I'll have to load it up once I get it.  And yesterday, I tried to teach her "pillow".  She didn't ever say the word, but she knows what it is and giggles quite a bit whenever I say it!

So, I guess you could say the tale is true: babies tend to either walk or talk, and the calmer dispositions (those who prefer to sit around and read books rather than explore) are probably most likely to walk late.