So, when she is not pounding her head against the floor in a fit of rage, all the while screaming “nowaynowaynowaynoway,” Stella has been *very* busy building her vocabulary. Each day adding a few new words — mostly a reflection of what she hears us saying [note to self: keep sailor mouth shut!] Her enunciation could use some fine tuning, but overall *we* understand what she is saying, and are so much better able to interpret her needs and wants. This newly found ability to communicate with one another seems to, oddly enough, be at the heart of her ever increasing need to voice her displeasure with a given situation. Something to the effect of “you no longer have an excuse to not know what I am asking for, and therefore have no reason not to give it to me”
Case in point: Yesterday when we got home she immediately runs to the cupboard where the catfood is kept and says “titee, titee” (this is what I mean abou that enunciation thing). In essence, she is pointing to the cupboard, then pointing to the catfood dish — her eyes beckoning me to get the food down for her. In my mind, I quickly flash forward about 10 minutes to a vision of us being done “feeding the kitties” (read: playing in the catfood) and having to tell her we are done feeding the kitties and we have to put the food away, much to her dismay. Believe me, this is exactly where it would have gone. Instead, I decide to rationally and calmly tell her that the kitties have food and we don’t need to give them anymore and try distracting her to come help me get her bottle ready. Yeah, you can all guess how well that went over. It didn’t.
Along with learning just words and associations, she is also putting together some strings of words. Some, fairly straghtforward: mo beee (more please), others not so straight forward…
We — okay, okay, Steve –has been feeding the neighbors cats for the last week or so, with Stella usually getting to go along for the ride. Over the course of this time Stella comes back saying her usual ‘titee’ (kitty), but she has also picked up a couple of new words: ‘eat’ (with perfect clarity), and ‘white’ (also, perfectly dictated). This morning, however, she came in saying all three in various order until out of her mouth came, you guessed it: “eat white titee.” To any other parent out there, this may have been cute and clever, “oh look dear, she is putting words together,” but to us, it was downright hilarious. We both looked at each other and thought “great, our kid is heading off to day care this morning to tell everyone about eating a white cat.”
