One of my favourite things about Jake growing up is his increased awareness of the world around him and the people in it. The sheer delight on his face when I go to get him up from a sleep still melts my heart, as does the little voice saying "'Ello Daddy!" and whilst he's currently calling my wife by her first name, he still recognises her as Mummy and goes to find her every morning.
Beyond that, his recognition of our friends and family is slowly increasing, but it's interesting to see who he remembers, which names he can recall and how he groups people together. For example, he now knows his 4 grandparents by sight (even through a grainy Skype connection!) and gets their names right most of the time. However, both Grandpa and Papa go by Papa, and when we went to see his great grandmother (going by the name Baba in the family) he initially talked to her as Granny, as being someone older with white hair. I have explained to him the brownie points to be earned by getting people's names right, especially grandparents.
When it comes to aunts, uncles and cousins, he's less confident. However, he knows the names of my sister's kids and found pictures of them the other day at Baba's house and came running in calling their names. He also picked them out during a family Skype conversation and delights in their company every time we see them. It may be that they spend a significant amount of time playing with him whenever we get together, or that they're closer in age to him so are that more interesting to be around. In either case, it's cute to watch. He's aware of his Aunts and can just about do names, but definitely recognises them on sight as people who will adore him and play with him (which also most of the rest of the world). Uncles he's a little less sure about, but that's also probably because we don't see them as much.
Our friends are an interesting mix as none of the ones we see regularly have kids and even those who we see on a frequent basis, Jake still takes a little time to remember who they are and that they are nice people to be around. On the whole, he tolerates their presence in our house but will definitely play with them if they get on the floor with him. There are a few exceptions, especially on our softball team, who he actively smiles at when we get there and who he will seek out as playmates during the game. There's a certain amount of Jake's trust to be won through reciprocity and engagement, but the rest must be down to the smell, or small body language cues, as he has been known to lend Hobbes (a sign that you've joined his inner circle of trust) to effective strangers and withold his affection from some of our closest friends for months.
As his language and communication skills continue to develop, it will be interesting to see if the way in which he engages with our friends and family also changes.
Thursday, 28 August 2014
Tuesday, 26 August 2014
Speech and language
More juice. Ank oo Daddy. Papa truck gone? Just a small section of the daily burblings of Jake who after mastering walking, pocket use and climbing stairs is now tackling mankind's biggest achievement - language. The drive to communicate has always been there, whether it's a cry in the night for food or comfort to tugging on trouser legs (or in Jake's case physically pushing and pulling people) to get what he wants.
Words slowly form out of the babble of noises, though we're not entirely sure what we'd count his first official word to be (we think "up" or "more" though they don't make for interesting stories like my wife, whose first word was her dog) and he's now starting to stitch them together into short sentences. At this point, he still has a small number of clearly defined words, though "Daddy" and "Hobbie" (more on Hobbes in another post!) are a couple of them. However, he's learning more and more each week and working out how to put them together to express more ideas. For example, he's slowly starting to learn the names of people close to us, and sticking the word "here" after their name shows his delight at their attendance. He's also got the idea of rising intonation and a head tilt to ask a question, so after seeing my parents on Skype the other day, he looked at me and said "Grandpa here?". All sorts of interesting connections being made every day.
We've recently taken him for a hearing test (slightly undermined by the fact that one of the objects they used to get his attention was a train. Jake. Loves. Trains. At that point, the test was over as all he wanted to happen was for the "choo choo" to light up) as we're concerned that he's slurring some of his sounds and doesn't appear to make others. The results were inconclusive but we think that two things will make a difference: Firstly, he's moving up to the big boy room at nursery, where he'll be surrounded by verbal children up to the age of 4 and given how much he learns simply by watching and copying, I think his vocabulary and speech clarity will dramatically increase.
The second, and harder change, is to get rid of his pacifier. We've always used it as an alternative to having him suck his thumb for comfort (there's enough bad teeth genes that we figured he doesn't need any help!), but the speech lady said that it can cause noises that only he can here that may be blocking out some of the letter sounds that he's struggling to produce. We've decided to only give him his pacifier at night to help him sleep and to be fair to him, each of the last two mornings he's woken up the first thing he's done when I've gone in to get him (after saying "hello Daddy") is to hand me his pacifier. It's been a tough couple of days as when he's calm and happy, it's not an issue, but when he starts to get tired or upset, he starts calling for it and gets frustrated when we don't give to him. As always, we aim to distract him, which works most of the time, and he's starting to ask for it less and less each day. I guess it's a question of being brave enough in ourselves to trust our judgements and ride out the tantrums (and explain to our friends and family what we're trying to do and not that we're just trying to piss off our child!) until he finds other ways to calm himself down.
Hopefully, both of these changes will impact on his speech and he'll continue this amazing acquisition of language unhindered and with the same delight that he learns all of his new tricks.
Words slowly form out of the babble of noises, though we're not entirely sure what we'd count his first official word to be (we think "up" or "more" though they don't make for interesting stories like my wife, whose first word was her dog) and he's now starting to stitch them together into short sentences. At this point, he still has a small number of clearly defined words, though "Daddy" and "Hobbie" (more on Hobbes in another post!) are a couple of them. However, he's learning more and more each week and working out how to put them together to express more ideas. For example, he's slowly starting to learn the names of people close to us, and sticking the word "here" after their name shows his delight at their attendance. He's also got the idea of rising intonation and a head tilt to ask a question, so after seeing my parents on Skype the other day, he looked at me and said "Grandpa here?". All sorts of interesting connections being made every day.
We've recently taken him for a hearing test (slightly undermined by the fact that one of the objects they used to get his attention was a train. Jake. Loves. Trains. At that point, the test was over as all he wanted to happen was for the "choo choo" to light up) as we're concerned that he's slurring some of his sounds and doesn't appear to make others. The results were inconclusive but we think that two things will make a difference: Firstly, he's moving up to the big boy room at nursery, where he'll be surrounded by verbal children up to the age of 4 and given how much he learns simply by watching and copying, I think his vocabulary and speech clarity will dramatically increase.
The second, and harder change, is to get rid of his pacifier. We've always used it as an alternative to having him suck his thumb for comfort (there's enough bad teeth genes that we figured he doesn't need any help!), but the speech lady said that it can cause noises that only he can here that may be blocking out some of the letter sounds that he's struggling to produce. We've decided to only give him his pacifier at night to help him sleep and to be fair to him, each of the last two mornings he's woken up the first thing he's done when I've gone in to get him (after saying "hello Daddy") is to hand me his pacifier. It's been a tough couple of days as when he's calm and happy, it's not an issue, but when he starts to get tired or upset, he starts calling for it and gets frustrated when we don't give to him. As always, we aim to distract him, which works most of the time, and he's starting to ask for it less and less each day. I guess it's a question of being brave enough in ourselves to trust our judgements and ride out the tantrums (and explain to our friends and family what we're trying to do and not that we're just trying to piss off our child!) until he finds other ways to calm himself down.
Hopefully, both of these changes will impact on his speech and he'll continue this amazing acquisition of language unhindered and with the same delight that he learns all of his new tricks.
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