First Language Acquisition – The Sequel

Several months ago I posted a bit about Anna’s first language acquisition. She hadn’t mastered her /k/ and /g/ or velar sounds. Two of you who are speech therapists assured me that this was totally normal. It was super cute while it lasted, which wasn’t long. She quickly learned to form them in the middle of words (word-medially) and next she had them at the ends of words (word-finally). Last, but not least, she could form them word-initially. Are you digging these official linguistic terms? Yeah, my linguistic prowess is not what it used to be, but I digress… The aforementioned speech therapist friends confirmed that word-initial velars are often the last to master. Whew. She’s ‘normal’.

General progression went something like this:
“Tent, avotado in the sack”
“Tent, avocado in the sack”
“Kent, avocado in the sack!”

I’m still missing the ‘avotado’ days. (NOT the food I assure you!) And she DOES call him Daddy 99% of the time.

She is a chatterbox. Yes, sometimes MORE than Joel. We joke that she is made for facebook and twitter because whatever she’s doing she is constantly telling you her status update! Thankfully, as I am a fan of QUIET mornings, she is too. Whew! But she gets really going by the time we start school. She sits at her little desk right next to mine and cuts, glues and colors for 2 straight hours. “I am cutting paper. I am cutting paper. I cut around the bowl. Look! I cut around the bowl Mom! Now I will get out blocks. I will get out blocks and build a boat.” You get the gist.

She’s made for school too. She is the first student to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance. She likes to lead it, “I badulations to duh flag…” She was walking around practicing her ‘badulations’ for a long time before we figured out that it meant the ‘pledge of allegiance’! And here I was trying to get her to say congratulations. It’s truly unbelievable to me that at 9 months I had her hearing tested because she wasn’t saying anything!

So, we seem to have moved from the gains in pronunciation, to the gains in vocabulary. Even though there are days when I’m feeling really done listening to more status updates, it still melts my cold heart to hear ‘Thank you God for Mom’ or ‘Luv you Mommy’. Those are the ‘it’s all worth it’ moments.

Hope I can hold onto those long enough to make it through the teens… each day has enough worry of its own.

First Language Acquisition – The Sequel by Kimberly is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International