Skip to main content

Milestone: Babbling

I love listening to Carl yammer away.  His babble has become much more interesting lately, almost like he was really trying to say something.  There are occasional groans, spits, and squeals but he also makes a wide variety of speech sounds.  And I love it.

A woman I admire advised at a baby shower that we should have "conversations" with our pre-verbal children.  She said that she would pretend she could understand her babies, comment on their babble, ask them questions, and wait patiently for responses.  I think about that whenever Carl gets really going.

But Carl never lets me get a word in edgewise.  He just keeps jabbering away, experimenting with a constant stream of sounds.  Since any of my "conversation" would be fake and meaningless, it seems rude to interrupt.  And so I just listen, totally under his spell, pleased just to listen and love.

Comments

Oozaroo said…
I will never forgot these two stories about Jenna when she was a baby - one time she babbled off a long string of 'talk' and then threw back her head and laughed like she had just told the funniest joke in the world, and another time when she was babbling away and holding a stuffed bear - at the end of the babble she said, "Grrr!"

Popular posts from this blog

Our Potty Training Journey

February 2010 GOAL:  My initial goal was to introduce Soren to the toilet and make it a fun place to sit.  I have to admit that I also hoped that we would have some fortunate "accidents" that would lead to potty training success. STRATEGY:  My plan was to sit Soren on the toilet once a day and read him a couple of stories.  If he peed, I was planning to give him a candy. THE BAD NEWS:  The candy totally backfired.  The one time that he peed on the toilet, I gave him a candy and he had a full-on tantrum begging for more.  If I ever told him "When you pee on the potty, you can have a candy", he would begin screaming for the treat and be unable to focus on the toilet training. THE GOOD NEWS:  Soren was not afraid of sitting on the big toilet.  He actually really enjoyed it (when I was reading stories and not pimping rewards) and started asking to sit there any time his butt was bare. J June 2010 GOAL:  My goal was to potty train S...

What Works for Us: Room Time

I've decided to do a new series of posts on how I make parenting work for us. Every parent does it differently--which is great!--but I have a hard time keeping my discoveries to myself. The things I do may not work for anyone else but I want to record them and remember them. Hopefully, it will also help me vent my soap-box-y-ness so that I'm not always imposing my ideas on other people. That will be what "What-Works-for-Us Posts" are about. One of the things that we have always done, but has made a HUGE difference in the move from one to two children, is Room Time . When Soren was 6 months old, I started having him play alone (in a safe place) every day for a few minutes. At first it was only five minutes in the port-a-crib but we quickly worked up to fifteen, then thirty. At that time, I used those precious minutes to do housework or relax on the couch. When I was pregnant with Carl, Soren would play alone for about an hour in his room and I would usually tak...

Just Enough is More

They say that later-born children have skinny photo albums.  While parents lavish attention on the firstborn (making certain to record every milestone and in both print and pixels), later children are forgotten and neglected.  So the common wisdom goes. Maybe its true.  There are certainly fewer posts on this blog about the younger boys than there were about the older ones.  And there's no doubt about it: fewer photos are taken now-a-days.  I don't even want to talk about videos.  Poor neglected Leif.  According to the records, he's hardly even a presence in this house. Except that's not true. The paucity of posts and pictures does not reflect an absence of affection.  It does not speak to my feelings about living with children at all.  I find them no less delightful and amazing than I did eight years ago when I first began my mothering journey.  If anything, the little ones delight me even more now.  I know better how to enjo...