the neighborhood watchdog Lucas is having a bit of a language explosion. His speech therapist pointed out that if I'm having trouble keeping up with the running lists on this blog, he's probably having a bit of a surge. Just in the past week, he has added dat - that, uh hu - uh oh, no, mah - mine, eye, hel - help, and rou rou - round & round. He's also changed the way he says banana to a very clear "nana."
Lucas also now says "uh" for both up and down. Hmmmm... we need to work on that one. I have no idea why he started that. We just keep reinforcing the correct words.
Okay... if you look at his signs list on the sidebar, it continues to expand, although he has not seen signs from us in maybe 2 months? Last week he added bear, truck and water. This week he added baby, help, silly and banana. And... I got some of these signs by just prompting, "Lucas, how do you sign ____." That's how I found out he can sign silly and help. He never did those until I basically asked him if he could. Strange.
Lucas has been doing well with identifying body parts, mostly on faces. He will point to his own, and to those in a book or on me. Last night before bed, he found one of his books on body parts, and basically read it to himself. He'd open a page with a belly button on it and pull up his shirt to point to his belly button, etc. So, I then decided to further test his knowledge. I asked him where his hand, leg, toes, feet, and tongue were, and he correctly identified all parts, with this little smirk on his face like "hahaha, you didn't think I knew these, did you?" All of this constant repetition is really paying off.
Another really cute thing he is doing is a bunny "sound." Whenever we do animal sounds, I always ask him, "How does a bunny go?" (knowing that I have no good answer). I then scrunch up my nose repeatedly like a bunny nose. He's now imitating it by opening and closing his mouth. I need to get it on video. It's so cute!
Lastly... for your viewing pleasure, here's a video of our baby who is finally not only walking, but walking in circles. If you listen closely, you might be able to hear him say "rou rou" for round and round and round. Repeating words in threes seems to really be working. Sorry the video is so dark - I take these video clips on my still camera and there wasn't a lot of light at the time. Also, I think his "ear" had just fallen off in all of his silliness... the wig tape had lost its stickiness for the day. The video is not captioned, because it's just baby jargon, and I don't know how to caption that anyway.