The words are coming a bit slower to F – in reality it’s probably more of a normal pace. We just didn’t know normal when we gave birth to the first child to come into the world speaking in paragraphs. F talks all the time, and the gibberish is getting clearer and clearer by the day. She even lays in her bed at night and babbles out endless strings of consonants until that moment when a group of them form a recognizable word that relates to a recognizable object and the people around her take notice and then joy of joys! She’s got herself a new word. If I go back to a Vegas reference, it’s a little like watching one of those slot machines spin around and around, with their tinkling noises and the blur of cherries and bars and sevens. And then the sevens line up in a row and a new noise emerges and everyone turns to look and point and admire. “Ball” is our latest row of sevens, and now she likes to rummage through her books to the ones that have a ball hidden somewhere in the pages, turn each page until she finds one, point her little finger on it and triumphantly declare that she has found a “Ball”. So of course we look, we point, and we admire. And she loves it.
And when we tire of finding all the balls in our books, we go back to the standby – finding our belly buttons. Always a crowd pleaser.
