I saw my 10-month old cousin on Monday night. She has two little snaggle tooths in her bottom jaw. She stands up while holding onto things; she crawls; she sticks out her tongue a lot, but she doesn't make many verbal-type noises yet. I was playing with her with some toys (an Everbody Poops rattle???) and I decided that I was going to try to teach her something to encourage talking. Why not experiment on the kid?
She has these foam letters and numbers that interlock together to spell words. I tried to link all the letters "A-B-C-D-E" together to tell her what's up with the letters of the alphabet. But she was totally bored by all that, so I moved on to spelling some words. The nearest letters I could find were the ole "D-O-G." Perfect! An easy three letter word that could be demonstrated with a sound, "Ruff! Ruff!"
"D-O-G!" I spelled, "Dog! It spells dog! Ruff! Ruff!" She looked at me with biggest wrinkle in her eyebrow, and her lip stuck out with her two little snaggle tooths pointing north and south. I could tell that this was the face she makes when her neurotransmitters are firing full throttle. I wish I could say that I witnessed her first word right then: "dog!" But no. She hasn't even said "daddy" yet. But after our little learning session, she did make some loud baby yells of excitement. "Urgnh! Ugrunh! Uuuuughgh!" Which I felt was some serious progress.
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