Language

Jacob's language is finally taking off, and in a big way. We kind of knew this would happen - it is apparently a fairly typical pattern. He's a boy, and a second child, and both of those things contribute to later language development. Most folks we talked to with some experience in this area (grandparents, other parents etc) said that when he starts to talk he'll REALLY talk, and that is what is happening.

He had been stuck on two-word sentences for a while, but now he is firmly in the multiple word domain. It was a couple of weeks ago when we first started to realize that his language was exploding.

Jacob and I were hanging out in his room getting ready for bed and he was playing with his cars (he is always playing with cars, by the way. Whenever we see a display or an ad or a new branded toy relating to the upcoming "Cars 2" movie, he dives into a rant about cars. Mostly unintelligible, but "CARSH" is always heard multiple times). Anyway, we were playing with his cars, and he picks up a fire truck, shows it to me, and says:

"Engine! Fire truck! one more..." (picks up an identical fire truck) "same, see? see? Same!"

so thats like three-and-a-half 2-word sentences in a row, but he's putting them together in larger constructs. You might say it's a paragraph of two word sentences.

He's really big on matching things up these days too. "Same", "match", "pair" are coming out at regular intervals, and he is really concerned with knowing that you know that he knows. so "See? see?" is happening a lot too,

Just the other day, he came out with this gem:

"mama eye" (pointing to Tricia's eye), "me eye" (pointing to his own eye), "body eye" (meaning "everybody eye", meaning "everyone has eyes!").

This should be significant to anyone familiar with my own language development, because apparently "everybody have noses" was the first three-word sentence I uttered as a child.

And just today, he said what amounts to a true three-word sentence: "I ripping, mommy!" used to show how he was disassembling a hot dog bun. I think this may be a bit generous to call it a three word sentence, since its really just "I ripping" with a "mommy" tagged on (which has the same effect as the above-mentioned "see? see?" but he is getting there).

The main point is that his vocabulary is indeed exploding every day. He points to things and we name them, and the he has the name in his vocabulary. He's like a sponge, and its amazing to see how he can start to make himself understood. From time to time he will have a large important concept he needs to get across and he'll try but eventually he loses to frustration and just blurts out a complete sentence full of nonsense gibberish, which is hilarious.

On and one more thing. He's got almost all of the letter sounds, but he's still working on "s" and has been for some time. Sophia is still "Fee-a", but he hasn't been able to completely avoid using "s", and there was a significant chunk of time where he would substitute "sh" for "s". Anything he pluralizes is still occasionally subject to this replacement, so "Cars", which he is still crazy excited about, becomes "Carsh" as you saw above. Other words that get this treatment include BUhSH (for bus), TREESH, etc etc.

And so, as you might expect, we call him mooch.