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.
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