Budding Vocabulary

I'm sure all parents of more than one child can't help but compare their children to one another: when they reach certain milestones, temperaments, interests, etc. Each of my children have different strengths and very different personalities. I don't really mean to, but I know that I label my children to some degree. I'll tell people that Adriana is our talker, while Miriam would be our observer, our climber, or our little engineer always figuring out how things work and taking them apart.

Talking has always been Adriana's thing, so sometimes I'll stop and remind myself that when she was Miriam's age, she....... (i.e. sentences at 12 months, when she was Miriam's age now she told us "Great-Grandma had fun horses." in reference to a merry-go-round music box at Great Grandma Bond's house, and using an irregular past tense and plural correctly, etc.). Miriam definitely lets us know what she wants, but I think I sometimes tend to downplay the language milestones she does reach because obviously she's not going to talk as early or as much as Adriana, and so I focus on the things she is really good at. Did that make sense?

Anyhow, the point of this post is that tonight I realized just how much more Miriam is talking now. I sat and wrote down the new words she has learned in the past week, and I was surprised at how many there are. Just this week she has clearly and consistently said the following words for the first time: sing (asking me to sing to her at bedtime), Adriana (said "D-yana"), Grandma (sounds more like "an-muh"), that ("dat"), banana (says the whole word, "banana"), down, cookie ("oo-key"), mine ("ine"), and our favorite "How ya' doin'?" (said as one word, "howyadoon" when she talks on her pretend phone, preceded by an enthusiastic "hi!"). This doesn't count the new signs she has learned this week (she knows a lot of signs; I haven't stopped to write down all of them). She's also starting to put multiple signs or words together (usually an item or action followed by "please"). Considering that she only had a few verbal words before this week (please, Mom, Dad, cheese, up, Jesus, hi, yeah, no, more, and all the letters in her name except "r"), it's pretty impressive that she has doubled her verbal output in less than a week. And really, that's not bad for a just turned 17 month old.