Words, words, words and trouble

G2 is a talker. I don't mean to suggest that he has a large vocabulary, because it's not that. But the little guy just doesn't stop babbling, and it's been this way since he first started making noise. For a while, it didn't seem like he was going to turn those babbles into actual words, but in the last month or so, language has begun to coalesce. As it did with LG, it started with animal noises, but we've come a long way. When LG was about the age that G2 is now, I tracked her words for 36 hours. And since we pretty much compare the two kids constantly, I decided to do the same thing with him.

And here we go!

baby
banana (sometimes "nana," sometimes "ba nana")
ball
bear
beep-beep (cars, trucks & buses all go beep-beep, or sometimes wee-ooo-wee-ooo)
bird
boat
bowl (almost always in reference to the dog bowls, which he knows he's not supposed to touch, but does anyway.)
bus
button (usually on my iPhone, but any button will do.)
car
cup
Dada
dog
eagle (Why eagle? He has a tiny stuffed eagle. Weirdly, he has an entire stuffed menagerie, but eagle is the only one he picked up on.)
Mama
night-night (this is adorable, and is usually combined with laying his head down.)
shoes
seat (Different from sit, below, because it refers to the place where he gets his food.)
sit (Which he knows from how many times we shout it at him while he stands on his sister's bed.)
this (this is a typical response when you ask him what he's holding.)
truck
up
water

Three things of note. I'm surprised how many of these are "B" words. It just seems a little odd. Also, he has fewer abstract concepts in his word list than LG had. He doesn't say "yes" or "no" or "me" or "more." But he has more concrete nouns, like "bear," "boat," and "eagle."Additionally, he has a book of shapes and whenever we turn to the page with the triangle, he shouts, "ker-rangle!" It seems deliberate and he's done it multiple times. To paraphrase Perd Hapley, "I don't know what it means, but it has the cadence of a word."

Tracking words with G2 has been harder, because it's not uncommon for him to point at something, say what appears to be a deliberate word, and THEN NEVER USE IT AGAIN. Case in point: He usually refers to the dog as "dog" or occasionally "uf-uf." But the other day, he looked at the dog, looked at me, pointed at the dog, and clear as day said, "Lola." He has never repeated this.

But then, he expends effort in other ways, like getting into trouble.

This is all perfectly safe, except for the height and the hand mixer and the cheese grater.

Ugh.